aya takano's compositions & sci-fi references

I've been meaning to look into takano's way of painting for a while ever since seeing the painting 'Doggy Drive' (detail above) in nel's thesis. something about it stuck with me, it feels like a very strong narrative just within this frame, I'm almost reading it like a film, I could envision it to be a vital part of an adventure, of getting somewhere important (I'm thinking about the chaos in paranorman when they were in that car). upon closer inspection, there is a pair od disturbing figures in the backseat, and this makes me think of a hostage situation. either way, something distressing is happening despite the seemingly lighthearted title of doggy drive. I love the colours used in here, it somehow feels very sci-fi to me. and the expression of the dog pulls you in, really. and you just feel like they're driving at night in the cityscape from the reflections? and street light at the back. Japanese contemporary artists really capture the balance between pleasant/cute and disturbing/horror perfectly, but not necessarily in an in-your-face sort of way, I love that about these works. and her titles are perfect, exactly how I would extend my painting... of course I'm looking particularly at composition and color, two things I struggle with the most, but also the way she represents things - not in a 'I need this to look realistic to be believable or taken seriously' way, but in a 'this is how I see this world and
that's that' sort of way that makes me respect the work a lot. I wish I could be that kind of artist. What I also like about her work is that some feel more collagey than others ( you could say planned) and some feel more unplanned and drifting.

I want to experiment with that balance... also, the strong narrative is something so impressive in these works, as if every painting is its own novel with several chapters or a lifetime of pages to read through. I want my paintings to have a narrative as well... she achieves this a lot through the character/figures... and their faces, even though they're almost always the same faces... I feel I should work through this by drawing more, perhaps thinking upon my dreams (I've been dreaming every single day and dropping down notes each time I wake up for the past few weeks, I have collected a lot of dream material in these years.. they are like collage material...) I was thinking about this the other day.. but a dream is like your subconscious/unconscious brain collaging for you while you sleep, and it presents it to you, with no guarantee of you remembering it... it literally takes images and abstract ideas and worries and fears of what you've seen in real life (whether you remember it or not) and thought about, and makes a new composition, like a video playing back... and because it is taking place in your psychological landscape it is hard to place physically.. like deciding where things go in a mind map.. sometimes it surprises you.. some visual you haven't thought about in days props up again in the dream.. you thought you forgot about it.. for example, after I watched that scene in the midnight gospel where they get all minced up, and I haven't thought about it since, I dreamed of it in my nap.. clear as day. in a dream collage does it include your other senses as source material ? (I guess your memories is the main material) like sound, taste etc.. I guess the whole human experience of living is gathering this dream material... in this way, in real life collaging, using personal photographs, that could count as memories? and films, the fictional narratives of others, interpreted by you.. that argument again of art is what you, the viewer, makes of it rather than the artist's intentions.. I think both is important.. I guess I'm exploring that in collage as well.

https://www.perrotin.com/artists/Aya_Takano/15

"Painter, illustrator, sci-fi writer and manga artist, Aya Takano belongs to Kaikai Kiki, the artistic production studio created in 2001 by Takashi Murakami. Inspired by all art forms, from erotic stamps of the Edo Period to impressionism, from Osamu Tezuka to Gustav Klimt, the artist has built a universe all her own. A universe made of infinite worlds, all means of escaping reality, gravity and its restraints, to attain a certain form of transcendence.

Aya Takano’s inner journeys wind their way into delicate works that convey a disturbing impression, somewhere between eroticism and impertinence. In a bedroom or in the metro, in front of the skyscrapers of a megalopolis or on the moon, naïve and androgynous girls are sketched out in thin, sharp lines. The artist’s mythology has constructed itself little by little, through her creations and visions of the unknown. In March 2011, a violent tsunami struck the northeastern coasts of Japan and led to the nuclear accident of Fukushima. A real wake-up call for the artist, this catastrophe deeply influenced her work. Preferring oil paint, which is more natural, to acrylic paint, for example, Aya Takano seems to pursue a new artistic quest, both humble and spiritual, influenced by a unique interest in science and guided by an absolute respect for nature and human life."
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https://www.perrotin.com/artists/Aya_Takano/15/view-of-the-exhibition-toward-eternity-at-perrotin-paris-france-2008/1000001006

"Trained in the popular art form known as kawaii (cute) as an illustrator for Nintendo video games, Aya Takano portrays endearing, wide-eyed androgynous figures with slender bodies; their extremities are systematically reddened, as if to illustrate their extreme sensitivity. For the Japanese, her work is technically irreproachable. Her mastery of drawing and color, combined with her capacity to work exceptionally quickly, is so great that Takashi Murakami has compared her to the brilliant Hoskusai, the 18th-century painter and printmaker. What also contributes to the quality of Aya Takano’s work is the breadth and unique aspect of her pictorial world. Inspired by her vivid imagination, she expresses her everyday musings in the form of small preparatory drawings to which she adds her own texts, written with a purity and poetry that is evocative of traditional haiku. She is also an adept of the Japanese practice of customization, and her compositions teem with details. The tattoos on the figures, the patterns on each piece of fabric and the quality of the jewelry and accessories are all backdrops for introducing drawing into the drawing (like her acolyte, Mr.). All these images are then brought together to compose the complex subjects of her large acrylic canvases. But the impression of gentleness transmitted by her light touch jars with the subversive nature of her work. For artists in the Kaikai Kiki group, the polish of the kawaii genre often provides a cover for the portrayal of controversial subjects. The paintings she exhibited in 2006 at Lyon’s Musée d’Art Contemporain, for example, bluntly illustrated young geishas in the exhilarating throes of budding sexuality. And “garbage” was the theme for her series of works in progress for the exhibition at the Galerie Emmanual Perrotin Miami in 2007, a subject inspired by the artificial creation of Yume No Shima Island atop a heap of trash in Tokyo Bay. Yet the artist takes on these regressive subjects with such a sense of whimsy that the perversity evaporates in the face of these incongruous compositions. Because Aya Takano lives in a world where giant squid fly among building and figures are stamped with two blue dots on their backsides, while others carry birds on their heads, like hats. The meaning of all these recurring symbols is elusive. And ultimately, this is the charm of her visual vocabulary, which is unique in the closed world of contemporary art: the heady exoticism of a foreign language."

A gathering of the ancient God of Food, animals from long ago, and the young who have been forced to migrate to this country (Not for human eyes), 2013

1300 x 1940 mm, Oil on Canvas