I draw people – the inside of people, contents.

When I walk down busy streets, there are so many people, and my heart beats fast.

Extremely beautiful girls, creepy guys, people without a home.

My imagination expands, and before you know it, my heart is caught by desire.

But it is so very comfortable that I go to town over and over until I am crushed.

At that time, the ugliness I carry and the town get to be together, mingled, merged;

And before you know it, I have become the nut called desire, large, hanging from the trunk of a great tree.

At that time, trunks already surround me…

Oh, it’s better to be eaten by something.

There are still many installations in exhibitions of museums, and they take the main part of international exhibitions. Then video pieces came next. However, young artists who do painting stand out at a level of a gallery. Yoshinori Takakura is the one of them.

I can clearly remember the impression of Takakura’s solo exhibition at a gallery in Tokyo in the spring of 2007. The primary colors of yellow, red, blue, and green shined brilliantly on the canvas as if they are from tubes directly –but it is not the right expression to admire him.

I am not sure who said it, but I can remember a book which said, “Paints must be more beautiful on a canvas than the moment they come out of the tubes. ” It is a natural thing, but in the reality there are too many young artists who cannot practice it.

In the case of Takakura, the extreme contrast of dense colors, the waves of brush strokes which spread colors on a canvas, and the sense of colors and brush strokes create mysterious and attractive shapes like an internal organ or flower. Thanks to such uniqueness, it definitely gives “additional value” to the paint. My intuition found special talent greater than “success” in his works.

His color is little bit opaque, yet it’s not dull. It is the oil painting’s peculiar appearance. And he presents it with the sticky brush stroke found in oil painting. The “behavior” is the nature that Japanese young painters don’t often possess.

It is a case of a lack in materialistic charm of the depth of oil painting, by using too much volatile solvent to make it dry faster, that plunges the surface into rough. I feel “poor” when I see those paintings. There is also the case of making a miserable oil painting by dissolving the paint terribly thinner like water color. If they do so, it is much better to use water color from the beginning. On the other hand, there are painters who use acrylic paint thickly like oil. I can see the cheap attitude of using acrylic paint just because of the easiness of it. I am wondering how they teach basic methods of painting such as paint oil like oil and paint acrylics like acrylics at art school now. Does the trend of making a big issue of saying “let men be men, let women be women” possibly make art education neglect distinguishing material and technique in a collect way?

Anyway, among Takakura’s alumni, there is a painter who can utilize extreme materialistic attraction of oil painting like Takashi Sobajima, who was awarded the VOCA prize in 2007. Also, there is an artist who brings out maximum characteristic and possibility of color pencils like Ryota Egi who held a solo exhibition at NODA CONTEMPORARY in the fall of the same year. Regardless of the education, they influence each other that may make progression toward an advanced direction.

The era of paintings is the era of fair evaluation of paintings such as drawing-like drawings, oil painting-like oil paintings, and acrylic-like acrylic paintings. Takakura, who displays the “behavior” on the whole canvas, goes with the tide of the era of paintings, and he will be the most remarkable painter in the future.