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REVIEWS TOMOO GOKITA
TOMOO GOKITA:
VANIT Y DRUNKO
HONOR FRASER, LOS ANGELES
24 MARCH – 19 MAY
Teaming manga sensibility with American pulp, Tomoo Gokita’s
black-and-white paintings and drawings seem at home in Southern
California. For his fi rst solo show in Los Angeles, Gokita presents
a series of images that at once long for the glamour of the silver
screen and the bawdiness of the adult fi lm industry, the gusto
of Latino culture and the order of West Coast Modernism. The
Japanese artist’s range of imagery is most immediate in a group of
nearly 200 small works on paper individually framed and clustered
on the gallery wall. The unfi nished series, which will eventually be
four times as large, includes fussy drawings of Mexican Lucha Libre,
chequered boards, bondage gear, fruit, signing hands, amateur
boudoir snapshots, throwback hairdos, Rorschach patterns, dildos,
stiletto high heels, mug shots, head shots, surreal landscapes, vintage
porn and mid-century real estate. Gokita’s graphite and watercolour
drawings propose referential pairings through didactic montage; the
female wrestlers of Californian comic book artists the Hernandez
Brothers motion towards Yves Tanguy’s brushy landscapes or
Philip Guston’s blocky interiors. The clean-line characters of Daniel
Clowes’s graphic novels are neighbour to defaced portraits recalling
John Stezaker and the anime creatures of Hayao Miyazaki.
While Gokita may be accused of lifting both Western pop
images and painterly technique from obvious sources, his large
gouache and spray-painted canvases remain distinct. Like juvenile
fantasies that were interrupted before they were complete thoughts,
his brash fi guration is often eclipsed by an exacting expressionism
that obscures heads and veils faces. In Hard Hap Topless (all works
2007) an armless female’s fl eshy torso is decked in a strappy Hard Hap Topless,2007, gouache on canvas, 193 x 130 cm.
thong and thigh-high stockings. Instead of breasts and shoulders, Courtesy Honor Fraser, Los Angeles
the upper body is a cloud of black and grey brush strokes that
mimic the supple curves of the otherwise classical fi gure resting in
contrapposto. Approximating a brand of portraiture found in high-
school yearbooks and passport photos, the grisaille study Modesty
presents a young man whose face, framed by a shaggy mullet haircut,
dissolves into an array of puf_f y swirls and worked shadowing.
Unlike the contained peep shows and awkward scenarios of
his mischievous little drawings, Gokita’s canvases seem to appeal to
some unresolved series of events or inscrutable context within the
frame. This ambiguity is broadened by his meticulous, hard-edged
abstractions. Interspersed among the fi gures, works like Wild and
Moody – a fi eld of blue-black and white knotted ovals and arcing
intestinal contours – or the not-quite-Op-art striations of Health
Club appear as glimpses into an oblique interiority. Demonstrating
the range of contrast possible between black and white paint, these
compositions speak to the smooth, refl ective surface of rubber, the
dull weave of a leather whip or the silvery iridescence of Vaseline.
Linked together like a stream-of-thought process, Gokita’s new
body of work blends raw sexual energy with cool restraint and fi lters
it through an adolescent and eager psychology. Catherine Taft
ARTREVIEW one.linfive.lintwo.lin
p147-161 Reviews AR Jun07.indd 8 9/5/07 02:26:39
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