ART-PRESENTATION: Tomoo Gokita-Fresh

Tomoo Gokita developed his signature style of monochromatic and greyscale painting from his career as a graphic designer in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Inspired by vintage magazines, film stills, pornography, and postcards he produced a series of newsprint books, some of which gained cult status. In 2005, he set aside graphic design entirely for the unconstrained artistic freedom of painting and drawing. From the beginning of his career as an artist, Gokita has worked in a broad but distinctive range of styles and subject matter.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Blum & Poe Gallery Archive

Tomoo Gokita presents “Fresh”, the exhibition is dedicated to his engagement with painting in color. Whether working in greyscale or in color, Gokita’s paintings have long been characterized by their psychologically charged subject matter: uncanny portraits, disquieting still lifes, and dream-like abstractions. The cast of cultural archetypes seen in his works of the past decade—from wrestlers and starlets to dancers and bureaucrats—were initially drawn from photographs the artist found in vintage magazines and newspapers. Once immersed in the process of applying paint to canvas, he would spontaneously distort these images. In his recent paintings, however, Gokita no longer refers to printed matter: the figures and forms emerge directly from his imagination. More ethereal and amorphous than before, Gokita’s supernatural figures are at once angelic and demonic, reminiscent of androids, aliens, and other undefinable chimeras. They recall the ominous creatures of sci-fi B-movies while evoking the vernaculars of Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Giorgio De Chirico, Francis Bacon, and Philip Guston. This conflation of the subconscious and the conscious is mirrored in the creative process itself, in which Gokita often paints and repaints the subject, sometimes changing the orientation of the canvas mid-way through, creating both literal and psychological palimpsests of rejected, reconciled, and mutated forms. Although Gokita is widely known for working in greyscale, color has been a recurring feature of his practice since the beginning of his career. Some of his earliest paintings from the 2000s were landscapes and abstractions executed in the similar muted greens, yellows, and pinks seen in the current body of work. He likens this tone to faded photographs and magazine pages. At the end of the same decade, he produced a distinctive series of cloudy abstractions in blue. Gokita’s return to color in the 2020s has given the artist a newfound sense of liberation in his expressive range.

Photo: Tomoo Gokita, Handsome Duo, 2021, acrylic on canvas, © Tomoo Gokita, Courtesy the artist and Blum & Poe Gallery

Info: Blum & Poe Gallery, 2727 S. La Cienega Boulevard, Los Angeles, California, USA, Duration: 15/5-26/6/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-18:00 by appointment (book here), https://blumandpoe.com