Koichi Enomoto

Enomoto’s paintings are distinguished by their maximal compositions that hold no space, literally and figuratively, between reality and fantasy, nature and technology, the pop-cultural and the personal. As an expert practitioner of manga, Enomoto pairs exacting draughtsmanship with highly modeled forms in a collage-like, quasi-digital space. Across its backgrounds are patterns interlaced with teeming cityscapes over which manga youths commingle with birds, dogs, reptiles, fast food, and other motifs. In such density, Enomoto mounts an ongoing narrative of obsessions in a trans- dimensional world.

Belying their vitality, a certain romantic nihilism emanates from Enomoto’s paintings. He devotedly pairs elements of nature and culture on a collision course that cannot be reconciled. Depictions of such fatalism spiral technology destroying humanism and individualism destroying the collective. But his idealized manga youths, as if part of a tight-knit street gang, appear to seek no meaning or comfort in this predicament, and thus only experience pleasure or wonder, or at worst, ambivalence. They are avatars indifferent to strife, accompanied by parrots, owls, pigeons, and dogs, joyfully constellating without boundaries or hierarchies.

Koichi Enomoto was born in Osaka, Japan in 1977 and lives and works out of Tokyo, Japan.