Sunday, April 16, 2017

Tomoo Gokita at Taka Ishii


(link)

You can do incredible violence with a painting, with a stroke you can mutilate. The horror film and the painter implement similar meat. Spielberg: If I wanted an emotional reaction from I audience I could merely kill a cat. And more than one way to skin one, Gokita runs the permutations of it, taking the Borremans or Tyson turn here, the paint as flesh. Watch a body be melted, a face cleaved. A flower erupts a deformity or berries, it's difficult to tell, something the horror film cannot do: a painting's wayward stroke contains an ambiguity that is interpretable, abstract, like previous Gokita paintings.


See too: MichaĆ«l Borremans at Dallas Museum of ArtNicola Tyson at Friedrich Petzel