""In my mind, I always try to start from scratch in order to avoid lapsing into a completely pre-established harmony by creating something based on a prior intention or plan," he has said. "Surprise is a necessity when making art. I welcome unforeseen accidents that transcend my imagination and let myself go with the flow. Mistakes are also welcome: failure breeds success.""
""His sensibility, wry and humble, is precise in its refusal to be pinned down. Gokita has long been interested in the charged space between legibility and loss. He borrows freely from pulp sources - wrestling posters, vintage pin-ups, promotional headshots - but turns them inside out. Faces are blurred, eyes erased, limbs reduced to suggestion. Yet what might initially look like erasure reads, on closer inspection, as a kind of care.""
Tomoo Gokita presents a recent body of paintings rooted in the visual language of the everyday, first shown in October 2024 at ICA Milano and now at MASSIMODECARLO. He began his career in the 1990s in commercial design, book illustration, and music packaging while making moody, warped graphite portraits privately that gained a cult following. Inclusion in the 2005 Greater New York show at MoMA PS1 followed. Gokita alternates between monochrome and restrained color, embraces surprise and accidents in his process, and transforms pulp imagery into blurred, suggestive portraits that register what is slipping away.
Read at Juxtapoz
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]