Koichi Enomoto was born in 1977 in Osaka. He currently lives in Tokyo.
Koichi Enomoto’s work is provocative and dizzying. Usually by combining a multitude of planes, motifs and styles in vast, virtuosic compositions that play with collage effects and superimpositions, his paintings present themselves as a challenge to viewers. They enjoin them to give their all to their interpretation, or to move on. Often, even large human or animal figures literally call out to us with their eyes.
By saturating the surface of the canvas and exploring its depth in successive layers, Enomoto creates skillful visual machines. Machines like the Tokyo megalopolis, which often occupies the background of his canvases: an entity where seemingly contradictory signs circulate at breakneck speed, where Paolo Uccello and McDonalds, the band KISS and pigeons, Taxi Driver and our smartphones all cross paths.
This prolific work can be read as a kind of exorcism. Or, if we follow the approach of the philosophers Deleuze and Guattari, as a great “schizo-analysis.” It is a place where self-portraiture and socio-cultural analysis are articulated, where the codes of representation are shaken up by the kaleidoscope of contemporary subjectivity, and where the cathartic multiplication of our desires and alienations is made visible.
His work is represented by TARO NASU (Tokyo) and Nonaka Hill (Los Angeles, Kyoto)
