[ artist statement ]

"One day we moved to a different country, and I was exposed too harshly and too abruptly to greed, poverty and suffering all at once. I was a sensitive child, but I learned to grow numb. Imagine a swimming pool, transparent and clean, surrounded by grass so green it seems fake, kept to an exact height and uniform all over, in a desert. Try to tell the stray dogs you see in that very desert that they’ll starve, but the grass over there is well kept. Try to convince them that you can’t help, for you’re busy saving up your money for a playstation. Absurdity in its most complete sense. But I participated, I was a child. I still do, perhaps we all do.

It is this absurdity that I have often referred to in my work. The “figures” I find while painting are never whole. I sketch with diluted oil paint, removing, adding and then removing paint continuously until I stumble across what I was looking for. Sometimes this takes an hour, sometimes a month. And what I am most often looking for is apparitions of the soul. Maybe I am not looking for them, but I create the conditions for them to appear. It can be my own soul, a memory I recall due to its emotional weight, or a piercing look I saw on another's face in passing.

The paintings are mostly somewhat translucent, patches of thickness suggesting their ephemeral apparition. They are not anatomically accurate, because they are merely attempts at making that which is intangible, the human soul, emotion, and the psyche, visible.

Through painting, I am translating what I have seen, and what I have experienced with regards to the human condition. Although the figures are often symbolic representations of the sides of our souls we prefer to ignore, namely despair, dread, fear and such emotions, I attempt to place them in a calmer landscape. Perhaps even beautiful, through the application of lots of thinner layers, hopefully evoking a sense of psychological depth in color. In showing precisely that which we try to avoid seeing, avoid feeling, there rests a tremendous beauty."

Taiyo Shimizu Larenas is a participant at De Ateliers (2025 - 2027)