Yoshitomo Nara: Greetings from a Place in My Heart, Dairy Art Centre

Yoshitomo Nara’s girls
Yoshitomo Nara is a curious customer. He is the pied piper of a strange and unusual playground in which his coterie of wide-eyed little girls stare out at the viewer from the softly applied pigment on his canvasses. The girls - for it is those made of sugar, spice and all things nice that dominate his paintings - are drawn, stylistically at least, from the manga-aesthetic that has immediate associations with his home country, Japan.  But looking deeper you find that girls can be bad too – especially if they listen to the western rock music beloved by Nara. Hence some little angels can be seen tearing through sunsets on motorbikes or smoking with their heads turned, shunning the viewer. Nara acknowledges the psychological see-saw effect of growing up in the stark difference between I Wanna Be (2013) and Midnight Vampire (2014). In the first painting the child is in a reverie, in the second, rapture.  
Western Influences
It can feel at times that emblems of “western cool” have had a compositional, as well as behavioural, effect on Nara and his girls. In Midnight Silence (2014) his handling of flesh feels almost Turner-esque, a muted poetry of marbled flatness. Phillip Guston, Peter Doig and other western painters liberal with their use of paint are also influences in his work– it is not just the “low” end of western culture that Nara infects with his manga.
Yoshitomo Nara Exhibition London 2014
What makes this show particularly interesting are the recent works on display and the vast number of works on paper which give insight into Nara’s working methods. Throw in a few recent bronzes and you have a comprehensive portrait of an artist that offers the audience respite from the sanitized and visually anaemic art that too often greets us in galleries.