Devan Shimoyama & Tomokazu Matsuyama: KAVI GUPTA | WASHINGTON BLVD. FL 1

10 April - 1 October 2024

Overview

Devan Shimoyama. Artist: "I have a desire to put more black queer bodies or queer representation into the canon"

Tomokazu Matsuyama. Artist: "In order for me to stay vocal and amplify my voice, I have to be in this gray zone,” ... “I am not Eastern-Western. I’m not cosmopolitan. I’m not..."

Devan Shimoyama’s visually scintillating artworks stop people in their tracks. Clad in such finery as fur, feathers, glitter, rhinestones, and sequins, his paintings and sculptures emit a magical and joyous aura. Viewers easily enchanted by beautiful things might get lost in the shimmering artistry of Shimoyama’s expertly crafted cosmetic veils. Those whose eyes and minds are willing to travel beyond the surface subterfuge of glitter, flowers, and jewels gain precious entry into a complex world of mystery, introspection, rhapsody, and desire.

Shimoyama’s painting practice is rooted in explorations of his personal identity and experiences. Mobilizing mythology, spiritual traditions, and the compositional strategies of classical painters such as Francisco Goya and Caravaggio, he crafts heroic and sanguine depictions of the Black, queer, male body. Many of the men in Shimoyama's paintings literally have jewels in their eyes, endowing them with a tearful, mystified expression suggesting internal suffering.

Shimoyama has stated that he wants the figures in his work are perceived as "both desirable and desirous." He is aware of the politics of queer culture, and the ways in which those politics relate to Black American culture. These elements come together in his works in a way that is both celebratory and complicated.

In his work, the American artist explores femininity within Black culture. ‘I think that Blackness and queerness should lift each other up, both being identities that are othered,’ he says....

A first-generation Japanese American who lives and works in New York City, Tomokazu Matsuyama has developed a singular aesthetic grounded in an elegant expression of what he refers to as “the struggle of reckoning the familiar local with the familiar global.” As a bi-cultural visual artist, he is keenly aware of the nomadic diaspora, a community of wandering people who seek to understand their place in a world full of contrasting visual and cultural dialects.

Though he manages a dynamic, wide ranging, and truly global practice that includes painting, sculpture, and large-scale public works, Matsuyama notably remains dedicated to furthering the most personal and intimate aspects of his aesthetic evolution. Each painting that leaves his studio is the fulfillment of hundreds of hours of work, as intensive research into source imagery converges with the application of innumerable layers of custom blended paint. The astoundingly vivid surfaces of his paintings project an almost digital brilliance, yet, upon close inspection, a painterly reality becomes clear, as hand-made brush strokes intermingle with delicately drawn figures, gestural splotches and drips, and meticulously spray-gunned backgrounds.