Kentaro Okawara

Our Life, Kentaro Okawara’s first solo exhibition in Mexico, presents a new series of paintings introducing Okawara’s distinctive notion of art as a key exercise to express love and to create bonds. When faced with the overwhelming complexity of our world, restlessness, uncertainty, and the very concerns of human existence, Okawara reminds us that life is good.

The show translates Okawara’s will to share happiness, love, and friendship in an intimate exploration of the concerns of human existence. Through lively shapes and vibrant colors, Okawara creates a series of friendly symbols for our feelings that offer a creative expression of his own existential situation and a means to engage with other people. To this extent, Okawara equates art contemplation with face-to-face interactions as his figures and characters display an imagery of his particular experience with the homeliness of a common language. These works conceive art as an ideal communication tool for its potential for mutual understanding. The simplicity and appeal of the language suggested by Okawara push back the geographical, cultural, and generational boundaries to establish a space for communication.

Our Life draws upon a joyful leitmotif to present a set of paintings that can be separated and recombined to shape a cheerful representation of the world: skies and gardens, creatures and toys, flowers and glances, butterflies and reactions, personified figures that conform a unique and relatable gaze. The dynamic relationships and the emerging meanings are framed in the same understanding that everything in the world is intertwined and that we are connected. His motifs capture happiness and playfulness in a pictorial locus to express his proposal for understanding the core of the human experience. In his own inquiry, Okawara has found a style that offers a lexicon to reflect life itself.

— Can Can Projects