Tanaka Raou: Burst of Blue
Raou Tanaka — Artist page
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Tanaka Raou, Burst of Blue — A Sharpened Flash of Blue Across the Panel
Tanaka Raou, Burst of Blue
Acrylic on panel / 10P (530 × 410 mm)
On a 530 × 410 mm panel, a keen blue detonates. The work is executed entirely in acrylic and depicts a lion — yet to search the surface for a legible likeness of one is, in all likelihood, to miss the point. What resides here is not the image of a beast but the atmosphere of its presence.
Tanaka Raou (b. 1985) was born in Sapporo, Hokkaido. He began his career as a caricature artist in 2006, and in 2014 took first place overall at the ISCA Convention in Nevada, earning induction into its Hall of Fame as world champion. The discipline of that practice — the capacity to seize the essence of a subject instantaneously, to decide in a fraction of a second what to exaggerate and what to omit — did not dissolve when he turned to painting in 2016. It was translated instead into a new vocabulary: the splatter and bleed of acrylic paint, and the charged silence of negative space.
In Burst of Blue, the blue carries no warmth. It cuts across the picture plane with the dispassion of a honed blade, and each individual droplet holds within it the velocity of the moment acrylic struck panel. The unpainted areas are not voids; they function as held breath, sustaining the tension of the composition. The reverberation of a roar, the instant air is split, the sense of forces in opposition — these converge to produce an involuntary physical alertness in the viewer.
What the viewer projects onto this lion remains a question for each individual. When one stands before the beast in the picture, the reason one’s pulse quickens lies somewhere outside the frame.
For enquiries regarding this work, please contact Gallery Seek.
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