Moe Shimada “mellow”
We visited Moe Shimada’s first solo exhibition, “mellow.” The venue is THE blank GALLERY in Harajuku.
Shimada is a fourth-year student at Tokyo University of the Arts, and we had also seen her work at the recent Geisai festival. She is an artist we have been paying attention to, painting figurative works with a distinctive nuance.
Artist Statement
For me, the act of painting is close to escape.
I want to run away from everything — human relationships, the things I have to do today, all of it. When I am painting, I seem to enter a world that belongs only to me, and it feels very comfortable.
I don’t have to think about unnecessary things, and I can forget things I don’t want to remember.My motifs mainly deal with people, but I don’t want to paint so-called portraits of beautiful women.
Rather than what is superficially beautiful, I am interested in the dirty emotions and ugliness that lie within a person.
There is so much — raw expressions and the like — that cannot be expressed through other motifs, and I love that.Most of the images that stream across social media these days are stylishly processed.
People apply too many filters — trying to make things look fashionable but crushing the shadows too far, so that sometimes you can no longer tell what the original colors or shapes were.
Something new is accidentally created. I find that interesting.
This is an act that has become easy in a modern age of developed devices.
Simply looking at ordinary photos and painting them is boring, and you cannot surpass the masterpieces of the past.
The title “mellow” reflects my intention to keep searching for new methods of expression from here on — but for now, please look at these paintings that are ripening.
The works in this exhibition center on portraiture, and each piece uses different techniques, so there is a rich variety.
The portraits mainly depict friends, but some works are drawn from images taken from social media.
Summary
Each work showed a different technique.
Overall, the tones of the paint are subdued and the application is not particularly thick.
There is no roughness; the painting is unified with a sincere and refined touch.
There is clearly still much untapped potential, and it made us want to see many more works.
