Slow Down, Mr.!

Keith Tolch04/13/2025≫ アート

申し訳ありません。このコンテンツはただ今、英語のみとなります。 For the sake of viewer convenience, the content is shown below in the alternative language. You may click the link to switch the active language.

Mr.’s solo show "It Was on a Brilliant Day." at Perrotin in Los Angeles

If you could have been at Perrotin in Los Angeles that day to read my body language, capture the anime twinkle in my eye, and catch with your undivided ears the excited tone of my stuttering and trembling voice, you would have immediately registered my exclamation, ‘Slow Down, Mr.!” as meaning the exact opposite. There would be no ambiguity, the spontaneous comment would have immediately impacted you just as it was designed. All your unanswered emails, dm’s, im’s, wechats, that whole required world of undifferentiated, text based communication, just for one second would have been gone. I live for the moments full of the subtlety of body language. We would have had an unambiguous, IRL human experience. Since we weren’t face to face, and you missed the shine in my eyes and tone in my voice, I will consider retitling the essay, “Keep Going, Mr.!”, just to make it more clear that he should never, ever stop.

Holy Akihabara, I stand before the acrylic cases of your rare gachapon and vending machines. Nakano Broadway, the streets of Shibuya, Shinjuku, all quantum entangled epicenters of かわいい (kawaii) culture are compressed into the unrelenting flatness (Superflatness) of his canvases, regular and irregular alike. The picture surface is immovable, irrevocable and any artist with chops knows in their bones, the pinpoint between the picture plane and the receding and advancing picture space is where the painting really lives. That’s where the center of gravity is, the –JSTOR ALERT– dialectical flashpoint that determines the expression of the image. GIVE ME SPACE OR GIVE ME DEATH! I yell this often in my sleep. This artist gives me both. Anime space. Onigiri death. It’s exactly what I need at this moment in 2025 while I fear all Japanese imports to the United States may grind to a halt and my life becomes flat. Superflat. Hands off my Nintendo, assholes.

Sure, there’s a subtle darkness to it all, but isn’t there with everything? Nothing is untouched by the free market, not even islands inhabited exclusively by penguins. Fort Tuxedo was the last to fall. RIP. One word: Tariff-fying. I suppose there’s nothing left to do but go into denial and try to fall in love with something. The darkness contracts like fluid in a watershed of otaku moonlight, つきがきれいですね. The literal translation is “the moon is beautiful, isn’t it?” In my figurative, 10-chaotic, artist-brained reality, the novelist Natsume Sōseki’s subtextual meaning of the phrase is what matters: “I Love You”. I once had this phrase whispered into my ear while walking in a photon field of a waning gibbous and that day while in the gallery, I pass it along to the artist for making these paintings.

After some research, I found that Mr. was trained at the Osaka University of Arts, working in illustration and design before making the leap to the world of fine art under the mentorship of Takashi Murakami, who’s known for developing the Superflat conceptual theory. His career took off in the late 90’s as his relationship with Murakami developed. The visual connection is immediately obvious, their brains are like brothers, though Takashi’s work is more all-encompassing and heady (read the superflat theory, baka). Eventually, Mr. was invited to join Kaikai Kiki, the artist collective and production company Murakami founded to support emerging Japanese artists. The international network helped promote his work globally. Mr. was also a part of the legendary show "Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture”

I feel compelled to flex my Japanese one last time: あなたはとてもさいのうのあるアーティストです. The mass-culture component of Mr’s conceptual framework asks the work to develop expansively, plastic and infinitely, just like otaku culture itself. Form and Content are linked, just as two words in Japanese are linked with a particle. The clarity of meaning develops as a result. The very character of his body of work emerges from the culture and projects the image of otaku right back to the people who want it the most, namely the West. It’s very easy to fall in dumb-love with Superflat artists (I did), and it would be fascinating to drink with them and convince them to spill the tea about irony, the United States, the performative image of the artist, and traditional 日本画 (nihongo) style painting. Shall we have another Shochu Sour? Revelations like that don’t come without a nasty hangover, but I’d be a wiser person for it, then do it again the next night. I suppose every artist has a cynical, market driven side, but when compared to so much of what I see, Mr.’s work seems to succeed on so many levels where others fall short and come off as just more art or content or whatever that’s endlessly produced to fill the space. There’s a real failure in that type of art. And while I'm studying his work, I see and feel something about people, paint and the specificity of desire and style and joy. Yet when other painters' capabilities are so limited, they only ask me to look without doing the real work of getting me to feel, I unconsciously begin to drift and think about ultra processed foods and the microplastics accumulating in my scrotum. That’s my cue to move on.

INFO

MR. 'IT WAS ON A BRILLIANT DAY.'
Feb 19 – March 29, 2025

From the Press Release:

Perrotin announces Mr.’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, a decade since his debut institutional show in the west coast of the United States. This presentation, his ninth exhibition with the gallery, opens the week of Frieze Los Angeles, and highlights his practice in recent years in painting, sculpture, and work on paper. New paintings are the focal feature in the north gallery, and in the south gallery, an installation based on the artist’s studio in Saitama, Japan.

If you’ve ever walked into a Japanese convenience store—Family Mart, Lawson, 7-Eleven, etcetera—you know that there is impeccable order and refreshingly high quality in the overwhelming array and density of even the most pedestrian of Japanese retail commerce. At the multi-floor, everything-and-anything from canned beverages to rice cookers to lacy underwear and of-the-moment rubber novelties, mega-discount retail chain Don Quijote, however, things are not so Zen. Amidst the labyrinthine din of overflowing shelves and in-your-face, bubbly, neon-painted signage, you may not find what you are looking for. Nonetheless, you will probably end up buying something you didn’t know you wanted and which you definitely do not need. Mr.’s work reminds one of that—not the young 1: Perrotin HK (2018) Mr., People misunderstand me and the contents of my paintings…Press release. link women’s shopping paradise of Harajuku, not the youth hangout district of Shibuya, but rather the overgrown jungle of mass-produced treasures, Don Quijote...

For more information contact Perrotin at
URL: https://www.perrotin.com/
Instagram: @perrotin