Purple Magazine
— F/W 2014 issue 22
Tomoo Gokita
introducing the world of TOMOO GOKITA
Pop artists, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, and Ed Ruscha set a precedent by bringing graphic design techniques into gallery art. Installation art, multimedia art, and what is now Information Technology-based art derive from their creative instincts.
Japanese artist Tomoo Gokita also went from piecework graphic design to creating personal art, inventing a world of images, characters, styles, and visual concepts in paintings, draw- ings, and unspecified images.
Gokita’s primarily black-and-white works con- trast varieties of familiar subjects, which he makes stylistically different. A lot of it comprises stylized portraits of contemporary personae — females and males of IT’s demimonde, cartoon icons whose faces reflect the polymorphous identity of mass culture. Together they represent a global mindscape, one in which actual people have to micromanage reality, self-identity, and a projected image on their apps as well as in their distracted brains.
What results is a seemingly effortless mix of drawing, origami, and computer graphics. His collages update Pop art and graphical gestures into an image-driven expressionistic art where mass information is shuffled like cards. The black and white makes such imagery easier to scan and maybe to think about.
— Jeff Rian
