His straight, densely gray hair, his cap with spirit of skater and the receptivity of soft eyes that hold more than what they say frame a face with a innocence and a level of distance from adulthood that is difficult to identify with a man over sixty. Perhaps it is their belonging to the tight and culturally rooted category associated with loneliness in childhood of those known as “key children”, who after school often returned alone and stayed at home unsupervised because their parents were away. working, or perhaps its obvious influence of a postmodern artistic movement like Superflat, which draws referentially from the iconography of manga and anime, but the truth is Yoshitomo Nara It is quite similar to his works.
His recognizable graphic style, consolidated internationally, does not manage to overshadow the completely overwhelming success that his country of origin continues to bring him, a place where, apparently, hordes of women – the majority members of his fan club – are almost more interested in his relationship status than in his art, as curator Lucía Agirre points out warmly during the tour we take through the anthology that the museum now dedicates to him. Guggenheim museum.
Nara, who is an artist sought after enough that a buyer paid $25 million in 2019 at the Sotheby’s from Hong Kong for his work “Knife Behind the Back”, he admits in an interview with LA RAZON that “I have never tried to draw girls with sad expressions because I think that Everyone perceives different sensations when they look at my paintings. There are people who find them friendly, others who find them cheerful or mysterious” when we ask him about the technical key of his most recognizable figures, the “Nara Girls” and he categorically states that he has not received “a cent from that sale and the truth is that I am not very happy that it happened. The consequence of that sale is that the general price of my works will also go up and my true fans are not usually rich people, but ordinary people. So from now on, it will cost them more to be able to buy my works and that does not make me happy.”
Disorderly
These striking dolls of large cranial proportions that have huge eyes in which they dive without haste (and without too much desire for intellectualization) and adopt attitudes that are sometimes adult, sometimes candid, sometimes disturbing, have historically been projected as girls, but Agirre warns us that “in reality they do not belong to a gender specifically because if you look at some of the outfits and haircuts, They can also correspond perfectly with boys“. When we ask the artist about the immovable decision to structure this exhibition that contains a total of 118 pieces between drawings, paintings, sculptures and installations, renouncing any type of chronological order, the liquid spirit of the creators for the works reverberates in his response. that time does not exist.
“I think that I am myself both then and now. Within me there is no chronological order and therefore, I did not want there to be one in the distribution of this exhibition. Thanks to this personal proposal I will surely be able to find out what kind of person I am. I don’t distinguish what happened ten years ago from what happened two months ago. During these forty years of artistic career time has obviously passed, but not that much. I have the feeling that these years are made up of small strips of time,” he explains.
“The nuances I incorporate in the eyes I paint have changed over time”
In the work of Yoshitomo Nara the childhood It is a place of return. A memory resource that confronts us with stages in which we were absurdly happy. “The relationship you establish with childhood is determined by the place in which you are born. I was never an introvert, I was simply lucky or disadvantaged to be born in a place where there were hardly any children. When I started going to school, I did a group of friends who quite enjoyed my company and I enjoyed theirs, but when we said goodbye on the way back home after classes and our directions diverged, I confess that I loved that last stretch in which I was alone, It was very important to me. It was quality time where I could talk to myself.“, confesses an artist whose head “reasons and makes my hands move, like an impulse.”
When Nara moved to Germany to study Fine Arts after passing the entrance exam for the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf and enroll as a student, his inspirational basis takes him back home: “I wanted to have gone to England to study art but tuition was very expensive there, so since Germany accepted students for free, I went there. If I had opted for first option and considering that I like music so much, I would have gotten lost in nightclubs and would not have studied much. Germany is a city that encourages dialogue with oneself and being there I remembered my childhood, my time in Japan and those solo walks when I came home from school.”
The cyclical and changing conception of his art causes even the symbolic interior of those large eyes that stand out so much in the configuration of his universes to change. “The nuances that I incorporate in the eyes that I paint have changed over time. I could explain the reason for my theme by describing the creation process, but it is not what I really feel. Something similar to those highly competitive athletes happens to me. They have such high tension that they don’t remember the moment they played, but the body moves, responds, acts without thinking. My state when I create is similar. If I think while I paint, draw or create, they don’t come out. good works. At a certain moment, my hands begin to move and the pens or brushes act. I call that moment “getting into the zone”“, he says goodbye. And for a moment, we feel that we are about to enter that space described.
