In recent years the work of Taketo Kobayashi has centered upon the forms of "landscape", "portrait" and "still life". And yet each of these forms is so splintered that the sense of a complete world is lost before us. His landscapes are infiltrated by foreign forms resembling man-made crystallizations, his portraits consist of a deconstructed face, hand, leg and other body parts, and in his still life fragmented projectiles appear as apples.

What is it that Kobayashi seeks to depict in his works?

Within his paintings we may observe a certain coolness as he approaches the process of dissection of that dense self-constructed singular world. And while this dismemberment points to a form of crisis, the pain of this fracture emboldens the work with a particular force of reality, leading us on towards a space beyond.

Kousai Hori, Artist/Professor of Tama Art University