Painter Daisuke Fukunaga (b.1981) states: "If the world is the stage of a theater, I want to paint the bustle of the things waiting behind the blackout curtain rather than the heroine." His motifs are of things forgotten and neglected, but unlike his earlier works of 2007, which realistically depicted drab equipment and everyday objects, his recent work further invests those elements with the fantastic. It is as if they are now imbued with life, their personalities slowly accreting in their abandon and disrepair.
At "Nostalgia," now showing at Tomio Koyama Gallery, Kyoto, "Flowers," for example, depicts a bunch of ragged cleaning mops inserted handle first into a cylindrical container. Splayed out in their "vase," the mops become a kind of fanciful ikebana, dragged up from the ubiquitious to a level of beauty.
"Car Shop" follows suit. The store has long since closed down, left to decay and gather dust and nostalgic emotions of the sad and lonely. From the dark, somber palette, however, emerge fiery sparks of orange at the left and an anemone-like form that seems to stir at top, while a happy face at the bottom of the image suggests a fanciful world coming into being from the ruins. This, then, is the near supernatural afterlife of an earlier lifelikeness.
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