
[ 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)