Statements | okubotakahiro

Artist Statement

“Painting is dead, aesthetics is dead, there is no more field to explore in this field and this traditional media has no more power to lead our history”—I was criticized by critics and artists again and again when I started my experiment to transform pictorial art into a new form in Japanese art scene. Now, while the field of digital illustration is being swallowed by A.I. appropriating ready-made images on the internet, I have a conviction that pictorial art could still keep evolving its form and develop its cultural context relating to our present time.

I started experimenting autonomous creation/evolution of my painting with automatism strokes and all-over composition that are the legacy of Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism—both are generally considered outdated but I tried to rewrite a continuation of modern painting history—and I found that this form invalidated the necessity of rectangle/vertical tableau format and let me divide and recombine multiple painting units into any shape to generate a new format. Then, I started inflating meta-dimensions of 2-dimensional painting; making it 3-dimensional by building a polyhedron structure or a swarm of floating curved paintings; then, adding a time dimension by moving it mechanically to build (3+1)-dimensional expanse.

Historically, painting is the art of inter-dimensionality which containing 3 or more dimensions in its 2-dimensional surface and through inflating meta-dimensions of it, now I’m considering the relation between this structure and the multidimensional universe. I’m also interested in regarding it as a swarm network building complex relations between shapes, colors, and spatial illusion on each unit where contingency produces countless eventual compositions that are totally out of control by the artist. And this whole evolution transforming its own form and expanding its contexts interdisciplinary suggests me the potential of autonomous and the post-humancentric worldview.

2022

Okubo Takahiro