Kazuki Takamatsu

Kazuki Takamatsu was born in Sendai, Miyagi in 1978. Influenced by media and subculture growing up, he attended the Department of Oil Painting at Tohoku University of Art & Design and graduated in 2001. Takamatsu’s haunting black and white imagery explores narratives of death and society, through a unique depth-mapping technique that he developed, a style of illustration inspired by Japanese girl’s comics.

Takamatsu currently lives and works in Sendai, which was devastated by the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami back in 2011. The event can still be felt in Takamatsu’s work which mixes memories of sorrow with a deep sense of hope in a spiral of emotions.

Being in Japan, he lives in a world with a shared reverence for traditional religion and pop-up culture icons like Hatsune Miku, or his city’s mascot, “Sento-kun”. He combines these contradicting ideas of idol worship into handpainted portraits of “Cyber Idols” that look three dimensional.

By contrasting the doll-like innocence of his translucent white figures with the stark blackness of their surroundings, his paintings express a subliminal violence softened by the ghostliness of their protagonists. His unique technique seems to be the result of a computerized depth map program but in reality he uses traditional mediums such as gouache, acrylic, gesso, giclee on tarpaulin and drawing combined with computer graphics. The paint is applied in different shades of grey and white layers on jet-black tarpaulin, creating the illusion of a 3D image or hologram.

Between surrealism and manga, Takamatsu’s work takes us to the 5th dimension.