Artist Statement (2018)
“Painting is dead”, some might say in this age of new technologies creating and broadcasting various kinds of visual images. And therefore I do believe that we can rediscover and expand our pictorial experience through exploring the large potential of painting media.
Medium of painting behaves objectively and its material behavior sometimes leads us into chaotic transformation. But in this chaos we can search and hunt our own visual meaning—and then new images are born as a pictorial experience. I follow this process to paint by using liquid medium transforming its form and color to go across between abstract surface and figurative image, two dimensional flat space and three dimensional deep space. In our long cultural history, art always walks on the border between object and illusion just as we human always walks on the border between chaos and cosmos to face with the depth of this world. I consider this duality is just the source of painting art and that is why my painting seems to be abstract as well as figurative. The vitality of painting is neither building nor breaking images, but opening the potential to generate images.
Image generating field of my paint let me go out of tableau painting form, through cutting works into pieces, shuffling, folding and combing them into three dimensional structure. Combined pictures reorganize their new pictorial space and expand it into sculptural, installational or even architectural space. Through this creation process, I try to make painting link up architecture.
My exploring the large potential of visual art has just begun but I have a strong conviction that pictorial art and architectural art will be united into one again like ancient caves, cathedrals or temples, just like the days people gather in such places and seriously think about how should we human form the relationship with this world in their own age.
“Painting is dead”, some might say but I do believe that there is still work to be done.
2018
Okubo Takahiro