The young Japanese artist Tetsuya Toshima explores the notion of passing time and looks to the past, present and future as sources of inspiration for his prints and paintings. Toshima’s work is characterised by a restricted palette, often monochromatic with small intervals of bright colour. The artist fuses traditional close observational draughtsmanship with pop like imagery and abstract passages, resulting in sophisticated canvasses with an edge.
In his work the artist investigates both the individual and collective sense of time, employing the traditional Japanese philosophy of the shining of yocto and the silence of yotta. His canvases present the moment at which these two points meets – the present, zero hour. Reminiscence appears to be a beautifully rendered piece of fabric but the genesis of the work is the concept of time running out. Like an hour glass, every stripe stands for a grain of sand, signaling how fast time moves. Deer takes as its subject a favorite childhood image of the artist, and is therefore an autobiographical look at his own past. For Toshima Deer encapsulates the Past as memory, present as chaos and the future as hope.
Toshima has had several group shows in Tokyo including the The 6th National Art Salon Award. He was selected as one of 16 Japanese artists to watch in DAZED and CONFUSED magazine.
