Taro Tokuyama

Taro is an artist of time. His cumulative methodology of dissection and carving gives character to each of the pieces he creates from paper, paint, natural objects (such as branches and bones) and paint itself –for its own sake–.
Some of his works employ an obvious montage that is necessary for the appreciation of their values: a self-portrait is revealed in the background of the mirror of the painting, while the tablet is suspended by a thread within it. A sectioned circle of paint made into an object rests on a clean, reflective surface that duplicates the perception of the surrounding space. This specular work enriches the experience and vision offered by each of these accumulated and dissected times.
Taro's object production displays a diversity of supports that take advantage of the graphic and pictorial qualities of the sedimentations that he provokes and produces. Sometimes he wraps a thin branch with abundant layers of printed paper, until achieving a generous thickness, to dissect it later. Other times he encapsulates ceramic, wood, seed or bone objects with paper or hundreds of layers of color in different thicknesses. By cutting the piece in half, or selectively polishing it to produce reliefs and visual patterns, narratives of the world are revealed that are comparable to geosciences and the search for the substrates that make up things, fossils, the search for identity and time, ideas about the levels of depth and superficiality are unleashed. The face and the entrails, the simultaneous outside and inside. Everything is revealed slowly.
Dissecting is a curious activity with a vocation for discovery; it allows us to describe through the senses what is otherwise imaginary. Cutting also means producing the wound that heals and leads to knowledge, to the vision of how everything works. It is a scientific attitude and psychological research through matter. The same occurs with the superficial carvings of objects and magazines. Encapsulating, adding and polishing. Then subtracting, roughening the surface and creating carefully designed chromatic patterns, which result in very topographic organic geometries that take advantage of the graphic values ​​of cultural and editorial objects, loaded with information and waiting for the construction of meaning.
There is also a trace process in all this graphic, pictorial and object work, particularly in all the pieces that involve the human figure. Some paper silhouettes that suggest presences and identities are inhabited by reflective surfaces or arrangements of pictorial residues left over from past works. The portraits, on the other hand, appropriate all the material of a magazine, linking image with content, bridging the gap between identity and representation, between the surface and the inner layers (of information and life).