Daughter of a fraudster

Tomoo Gokita began his career as an illustrator and designer in the 1990s. It wasn’t until after 2005 that he began to dedicate his time completely to painting and drawing, inspired by film, vintage pornography magazines (his father worked as a designer for Playboy’s printed advertisements), and Japanese and American subcultures from the 1960s and 1970s.

Gokita is best-known for enigmatic greyscale paintings that depict dream-like scenes and subjects. Distorted faces and bodies, sometimes with features reduced to abstract shapes and cartoonish forms, are hallmarks of his paintings.

Speaking of this practice, Gokita says ‘I am presuming that to deform the human face might be a reaction against my practice of depicting them like crazy when I was young. Probably, I have become tired of depicting faces. Also, I have loved the masked wrestlers of the Mexican Lucha libre and those masks in Africa all this time, and a kind of transformational desire “to hide a face and to become a different character,” which can be symbolised in those masks, may have affected my work. I suppose there exists a certain ghoulish curiosity towards monsters and deformities, too.’

Like many of his portraits, the title of this painting, Daughter of a fraudster, refers to a character-type, variously found by the artist in Hollywood cinema, pulp fiction and other forms of popular culture. In this case, Gokita’s subject is subdued and enigmatic and, much like a Hollywood archetype, she is a surface onto which the viewers project their own thoughts and emotions.