Kaoru Arima

A person in a red sweater

Arima’s free brushstrokes gesture towards traditions in Expressionist painting. As with the acrylic paintings Ticket, and Person in red sweater, these works could be seen as an attempt at “pure painting” in which the aesthetics of the medium supersede content. But if his portraits resist social commentary, they nonetheless challenge conventional standards of beauty through a decided embrace of decayed forms and colors. Inspired by underground creative cultures, his paintings have the slipshod spontaneity of graffiti and other types of street art. His figurative work, however, suggests a deeper sense of anxiety and discomfort, and his subjects seem projected out of a Surrealist nightmare of melting bodies. Both works are ultimately about fluctuation and an exemplary model of how painting (at its most expressive) can visualize complex psychic states of being.