Donald Yatomi

Click on Image to View MoreDonald Yatomi’s wide-angled compositions originated in the early 1990s as a sarcastic attempt to capture the then trend of cropped, panoramic photography and film developing. The panoramic format stuck as he continued his interest for urbanscape paintings, in which it eventually and suitably evoked the subject of population sprawl and mass-communities that he was after.

Yatomi’s work is about the industrial mundane, the urbanized deserts and the metropolis serenity. He finds witnessing the ironies of mobilization and stillness interlaced within highly developed and overcrowded cities very interesting. His ideas are implications and hints of alienation vs. congregation that occurs at a particular point in time, in very specific locations. It is not urban development itself that he is inevitably drawn to, but rather the paradoxes of every human meeting and isolation in the midst of urban development. It is about transportation. It is about transactions. It is about emotional epiphanies. These negative spaces and cultural icons evoke so much activity within his memory, becoming abstractions and reminiscences that are so intriguing to Yatomi. He names his greatest influences as Willem de Kooning, Chuck Close and Antonio Tapies.