On Saturday, October 7th, downtown Los Angeles’ Corey Helford Gallery (CHG) will proudly unveil an all-new series of works from Japanese artist Kazuki Takamatsu, titled Parallelization Era, in the Main Gallery.
Takamatsu’s haunting black and white imagery explores narratives of death and society, through a unique depth-mapping technique that he developed, in which classic mediums such as drawing, airbrush and gouache painting are combined with computer graphics.
Takamatsu shares: “This exhibition is a group of works that expresses the parallel processing of human beings, who use multiple brains to derive a single answer at high speed. In recent years, I feel that we don’t for ourselves but rather we ask the internet all our questions. We’ve entered an age in which we can share answers that feel good to us with someone we don’t even know. It’s as if there are many alter egos of you all over the world and it’s not only for humans, it could also be AI. You will be given answers one after another, answers that you have never experienced, what you should do in the future, and even what you should buy. I feel a strange sense of wonder in this age where efficiency is so important that we no longer worry about a single answer and think deeply about it. Someone is a part of me, and I am a part of someone else.” Marking Takamatsu’s sixth solo show at the gallery, Parallelization Era follows his Your Wings show (January 2021).
Open to the public and free of charge, Parallelization Era is set to debut on Saturday, October 7th from 7:00 pm – 11:00 pm in CHG’s Main Gallery. The award-winning, international renowned German artist duo Mark Landwehr and Sven Waschk [coarse] will open the same night in the Main Gallery with their new exhibition Because I Wanted You To Know. Also opening the same night will be the gallery’s second installment of their Literartistry II group show in Gallery 2 and a three-artist show, titled Bound by Nature, in Gallery 3 featuring new works by Canadian illustrator and author Dena Seiferling, surreal painter of nature Lisa Ericson, and Russian born/Sydney-based painter Yulia Pustoshkina. All shows will be on view through November 11th.
About Kazuki Takamatsu:
Kazuki Takamatsu was born in Sendai, Japan in 1978. From a country known both for its picturesque landscapes and for its extremely high suicide rate, his work aims to highlight this duality of enchanting beauty and dreadful sadness.
Takamatsu attended the “Oil Painting” faculty at the renowned Tohoku University of Art and Design, where he graduated in 2001. He currently lives and works in his hometown, Sendai, known for having been nearly completely destroyed by the earthquake and tsunami Tohoku in 2011. Takamatsu’s work still presents a clear connection to those catastrophic events, and his work creates beautiful hybrids of pain and hope, luring the viewer into a never-ending spiral of emotions.
To create his beautiful pieces, Takamatsu uses a technique known as “depth-mapping” while also getting inspiration for his subjects from the classic Japanese manga girls. Depth-mapping is a mixed media technique that consists of the combination of classical drawing, airbrush, graphics and gouache hand painting. This process makes it so that every single pixel appears as a specific shade of grey which is proportional to the distance the viewer sees it from. Thanks to this technique Takamatsu is able to give his work an incredible amount of depth and surrealism. His monochromatic Lolitas are born in a study and they are then shaped through infinite shades and tones of whites and greys, to emerge from an abysmal depth into the breathtaking compositions that are Takamatsu’s final pieces.
Takamatsu expresses these principles through dark, violent narratives of melancholic floating infant figures holding tightly onto symbolic objects such as skulls or weapons of mass destruction. Meanwhile, his Lolita’s are depicted in poses of mesmerizing innocence creating a surreal dimension where every corner could be hiding either the most warming light or the most ruthless darkness. The artworks are clearly profuse with the artist’s empathy and sensitivity and as he mentions in an interview: “Each and every one of the layers in my paintings represents a distance where there isn’t any shade or any light, an environment in which you can explore dark themes such as death and the current social conditions.”
About Corey Helford Gallery:
Established in 2006 by Jan Corey Helford and her husband, television producer/creator Bruce Helford (The Conners, Lopez vs. Lopez, Anger Management, The Drew Carey Show, and George Lopez), Corey Helford Gallery (CHG) has since evolved into one of the premier galleries of New Contemporary art. Its goal as an institution is to support the growth of artists, from the young and emerging, to the well-known and internationally established. CHG represents a diverse collection of international artists, primarily influenced by today’s pop culture and collectively encompassing style genres such as New Figurative Art, Pop Surrealism, Neo Pop, Graffiti, and Street Art. Located in downtown Los Angeles (571 S. Anderson St. Los Angeles, CA 90033) in a robust 12,000 square-foot building, CHG presents new exhibitions approximately every six weeks. The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday from 12:00 pm – 6:00 pm. For more info and an upcoming exhibition schedule, visit CoreyHelfordGallery.com and follow on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. For available prints from CHG, visit CHGPrints.com.