My consideration always moves toward society or ordinary lives because those are the real facts. Ordinary people, including myself, who are seen on streets, express their fundamental reality thorough appearance. My attempt is to spotlight people individually to show their reality but not as unique persons. The individual remains anonymous in my works. I see myself in their image. Perhaps, so do others. Looking into others to extract their presence on a canvas is the same as the act of self-exploration that I use while searching deeply inside of myself. Eventually, my paintings of people become my self-portraits, and my self-portraits are the mirror of their audience. I use myself as a reflection of what is common in all of us.
I provide a series of works which has the same subject matter or model and juxtapose them. The faces or figures of my paintings contain certain characteristics that offset the uniqueness of each other because the audience instinctively standardizes what they see, as people do to sort and filter in their everyday life. Standardization is instinctive in human beings. For instance, when people see a lot of books on a shelf, they perceive the books as a group but do not pay attention to each title. Making more of the same series and juxtaposing more of them makes them closer to the impression of “people” as anonymous. I paint figurative appearances through less definitive and less recognizable outlines by subtracting the fine details that would indicate the model’s identity. These actions of de-personalization and de-characterization are equal to the way people treat each other unless their relationships are personal or deep enough. My method parallels that social mechanism.
My paintings look clear enough to perceive the face. You think you see what I paint literally. But actually my images are the effect of massed chaotic incidents caused by natural rules such as gravity, temperature, physical characteristics of the medium, and particles. It parallels life and nature. We are prone to chaos but we organize our lives in order to survive. On the surface, most of life and society appear to be ordinary, somewhat normal, relevant, and precise. However, these appearances consist of intricate chaotic elements.
I use expressive dynamic brush strokes to strip emotion away from the canvas. Making portraits or self-portraits focuses on individuals or specializing commonalities to create an art of the anonymous, the ordinary. This contradiction reflects our society. The acceptance of and the challenge to such contradiction is essential in my art.
–Self-portrait as social-portrait, social-portrait as self-portrait–
Taku