The first time I saw the paintings of Tetsuya Ishida was in the mid-1990s when I was a teenager. The works were obviously foreign to me, creating a sort of darkness that supermodernity can cast over the individual, something that at the time I was beginning to recognize as a condition of the new century but also a particular topic that many seemed to be challenging and examining in the 1990s. You could think of Radiohead’s Ok Computer, David Fincher’s adaptation of the novel Fight Club, Naomi Klein’s writing in No Logo, and you could look at the paintings of Ishida and begin to see a certain fear of technology and its effects on labor, work, and social life beginning…