Tomoo Gokita is a Japanese painter born in 1969 who made a name for himself by distorting faces and blurring the boundaries between abstraction and figuration. A former graphic designer turned artist, he has transformed his father’s pornographic magazines and American wrestlers into a pictorial language of his own. He is an artist who plays with our primal fears, transforms pin-ups into faceless creatures, and makes painting an arena of lucha libre where the real and the fake fight to the death.
Here is the kind of artist the art market loves: a Japanese who has digested American expressionism, who quotes Pollock without ever naming him, who paints in black and white because it’s classier, and who now turns to pastel colors because it’s time to renew the stock. New York galleries love him, from Mary Boone to Petzel, via Blum & Poe. Normal, Gokita serves them exactly what they want: a measured dose of exoticism, Japanese sophistication mixed with American violence, all wrapped up in a discourse on improvisation and accident.
But let’s not be fooled. Behind this commercial facade hides a real painter. Gokita is not just a marketing product, he is an obsessive of the gesture, a maniac of the surface, an alchemist who transforms obscenity into poetry. His canvases are pitched battles between control and chaos, between the figure and its dissolution. When he paints, it’s as if he seeks to smother his subjects under layers of gray, to bury them alive in the pictorial material.
Gokita’s story begins in the 1990s, when he left his art studies to become a graphic designer. He designed flyers for Tokyo clubs, created record sleeves, lived the Japanese nightlife. But the artist in him could not be silenced. In 2000, he published “Lingerie Wrestling”, a collection of drawings that became cult. Women in underwear fighting, drawn in charcoal and ink. It’s violent, it’s sexual, it’s funny. It’s above all a declaration of war on well-behaved painting.
Since then, Gokita has been refining his arsenal. His brushes have become weapons of mass destruction. He takes a magazine photo, projects it mentally onto his canvas, and then methodically massacres it. Faces disappear under abstract stains, bodies twist in impossible poses, backgrounds collapse in gray mists. It’s Francis Bacon revisited by a Tokyo otaku, Willem de Kooning sprinkled with manga culture.
What strikes us about Gokita is his elegant brutality. He has this very Japanese way of making violence acceptable, almost refined. His brushstrokes are precise like sword strikes, his compositions balanced like Zen gardens. But beneath this polished surface rumbles a silent rage, a desire to destroy and rebuild everything according to his own rules.
The paradox of Gokita is that he claims to improvise when everything in his work breathes calculation. “I have no intention,” he says. I find it hard to believe! Every gesture is weighed, every accident is provoked, every surprise is orchestrated. He is a magnificent liar, an illusionist who pretends not to know his tricks. He tells us that he paints without thinking, but his canvases are conceptual war machines.
His relationship with American culture is interesting. He grew up with Playboy and comics, with jazz and B-movies. His father worked for the Japanese edition of Playboy [1], and little Tomoo secretly flipped through these magazines. These images marked him for life. But instead of copying them stupidly, he digested, transformed, and Japanized them. He took American vulgarity and sublimated it into Tokyo elegance.
Gokita’s women are specters. They have lost their faces but kept their sex appeal. They float in grayish limbo, halfway between eroticism and horror. They are disfigured Venuses, atomized Aphrodites. Gokita shows us what remains of desire when its object is removed, what subsists of beauty when it is deprived of form.
But beware, Gokita is not just a painter of absence. He is also a secret colorist. Since 2020, he has returned to color, and his latest canvases explode with pastel tones. Powdered pinks, washed-out blues, sickly greens. It’s as if David Lynch decided to repaint a Japanese tea room. These colors are both soft and disturbing, seductive and repulsive.
There is something profoundly neurotic in Gokita’s painting. His characters all seem to suffer from an identity disorder, as if they had forgotten who they were. The families he paints look like assemblies of ghosts, the couples like duos of sleepwalkers. In “The Dead Family” (2024), he shows us a nuclear family transformed into a still life. Dad, mom, and the kids are there, but something is wrong. Their faces are black holes, their bodies disjointed mannequins.
This obsession with the erasure of the face is not trivial. In Japanese culture, the face is the seat of social identity. Losing it means losing one’s place in the world. Gokita plays with this fundamental anguish. His characters are outcasts, pariahs of the image. They exist but no longer belong to our reality.
Gokita’s technique is impeccable. He uses acrylic and gouache to create perfectly smooth surfaces, without a trace of the brush. It is an industrial, almost mechanical painting. But this apparent coldness hides a complex gestural process. Gokita works in layers, adding and subtracting, building and destroying. Each canvas is the result of a fierce struggle between the artist and his medium.
His relationship with art history is ambiguous. He quotes without quoting, borrows without stealing. We find in his work echoes of cubism, surrealism, abstract expressionism. But these references are digested, metabolized, transformed into something else. Gokita is not a pasticheur, he is a cannibal. He devours his masters to better regurgitate them.
The influence of Mexican wrestling on his work is worth lingering over. Lucha libre is a theater of cruelty where masks hide the identity of the fighters. This is exactly what Gokita does with his characters: he masks them, anonymizes them, transforms them into archetypes. His canvases are rings where primal forces clash: Eros against Thanatos, figuration against abstraction, control against chaos.
Is Gokita an important artist? The question is worth asking. In an art world saturated with images, his strategy of erasure may be salutary. He reminds us that seeing is also not seeing, that showing is also hiding. His canvases are visual enigmas that resist easy interpretation.
But let’s not be duped. Gokita also plays the game of the market. His collaborations with fashion and music, his exhibitions in trendy galleries, all this is part of a well-oiled commercial strategy. He has understood that to survive in the world of contemporary art, one must be both an artist and a businessman.
What saves Gokita is his humor. There is a black comedy in his canvases, a sense of the absurd that prevents them from being taken too seriously. His disfigured characters have something cartoonish, his most dramatic compositions border on the grotesque. It’s Beckett meeting Tex Avery, Giacometti crossing paths with Mickey Mouse.
Gokita’s recent evolution towards color may mark a turning point. After years spent in grays, here he is venturing into pastels. Is this a sign of maturity or a concession to the market? Hard to say. But these new canvases have an unexpected freshness, a lightness that contrasts with the darkness of his beginnings.
In the landscape of contemporary Japanese art, Gokita occupies a unique place. He does not have Takashi Murakami’s pop strategy, nor the minimalist conceptualism of his compatriots. He is closer to a Yoshitomo Nara, but darker, more twisted. He is a painter who embraces painting, who still believes in the power of the painted image.
We must see Gokita as a symptom of our time. His erased faces are perhaps a metaphor for our own loss of identity in the digital age. His ghostly figures reflect our condition as derealized beings, floating between the virtual and the real. He paints zombies for a zombie civilization.
Paradoxically, it is by erasing faces that Gokita reveals the human. His faceless characters are more expressive than many hyperrealistic portraits. They speak to us of solitude, alienation, frustrated desire. They are troubled mirrors in which we can project our own anxieties.
Gokita’s strength is that he does not seek to reassure us. His canvases are uncomfortable, disturbing, sometimes repulsive. They offer us no refuge, no consolation. They confront us with what we would prefer not to see: our own emptiness, our own monstrosity. And yet, there is beauty in this work. A sick, perverse beauty, but beauty nonetheless. Gokita’s grays have infinite nuances, his compositions a morbid elegance. It is art that hurts, but it is art.
Deep down, Gokita is a dark romantic. He still believes in painting as a medium of revelation, as a means of accessing hidden truths. His canvases are séances where he summons the ghosts of our collective unconscious. Disfigured pin-ups, dead families, spectral wrestlers: so many apparitions that haunt our contemporary imagination.
Gokita’s international success proves that he has struck a chord. His images speak a universal language, that of postmodern anguish. New York, London, Tokyo: everywhere his ghosts find an echo. Perhaps that’s what globalization is: we all have the same nightmares. But Gokita remains deeply Japanese. There is in his work this typically Nippon ability to aestheticize horror, to make beautiful what should be repulsive. His canvases are like apocalyptic haikus, Zen gardens planted with corpses.
What to think of his last exhibition “Gumbo”? The title is revealing. Gumbo is this Louisiana stew where everything and anything is mixed. This is exactly what Gokita does: he throws into the cauldron of his painting all the debris of our visual culture and stirs until he gets something new.
The scarecrows of his last series are particularly eloquent. These guardians of the fields are supposed to scare birds, but in Gokita’s work, they are the ones who look terrified. They float in undefined landscapes, ghosts of a vanished rural world. A perfect metaphor for the contemporary artist: a scarecrow that no longer scares anyone.
The question now is: where is Gokita going? Will he continue to explore color? Will he return to black and white? Will he repeat himself or reinvent himself? The future will tell. But one thing is certain: he has already marked his era. His faceless images have become the icons of our time. In a world saturated with selfies and social networks, Gokita reminds us of the power of erasure. His canvases are antidotes to contemporary narcissistic overdose. They tell us: look, we can still disappear, we can still hide, we can still be mysterious.
Perhaps that is Gokita’s ultimate message: in a world of total transparency, opacity becomes subversive. His masked characters are resisters, partisans of the shadow. They refuse to play the game of visibility at all costs. Tomoo Gokita is not the greatest painter of his generation, but he is one of the most necessary. He shows us what we do not want to see, he paints what we would prefer to forget. His canvases are memento mori for the Instagram era, vanities for the 21st century.
Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs: Gokita deserves your attention. Not because he is fashionable, not because he sells well, but because he touches on something essential. He speaks to us about what it means to be human at a time when humanity itself is in question. Gokita’s art is a form of resistance. Resistance to ease, to transparency, to evidence. His canvases demand that we linger, that we decipher them, that we lose ourselves in them. In a world that goes too fast, they force us to slow down. In a world that is too noisy, they invite us to silence.
And perhaps that is Gokita’s true talent: to silence the chatterers and to make the snobs think. In the circus of contemporary art, he is the acrobat who falls on purpose, the clown who makes no one laugh. He is the one who reminds us that art is not made to please, but to disturb. So, you bunch of snobs, next time you come across a Gokita canvas, take the time to really look at it. Behind these erased faces, these twisted bodies, these sick colors, there may be a mirror. And in that mirror, you might catch a glimpse of your own ghost.
- “Gokita’s fascination with female performers is another defining theme of his work… This source of inspiration frequently shines through his paintings… This influence likely stems from the artist’s childhood, as his father was involved in the design of the Japanese edition of Playboy magazine” (Source: Massimo De Carlo Gallery)
