Base Gallery is pleased to present “Tracing / Background,” a solo exhibition by Keisuke Shirota.

A camera can be described as newly acquired another eye for human beings, and the things we see in the photograph are recognized as something that had certainly existed there when the photograph was taken. As a matter of course there is somewhat a slight discrepancy between what the photograph shows us and what we actually see there, however.

In the past several years, Keisuke Shirota has been working on a body of mixed media artwork with a combination of photograph and painting. In the series of “Another Day” and “A SENSE OF DISTANCE,” he has placed and pasted arbitrary photograph on canvas and expanded the surrounding scenery by painting. By letting photograph and painting face each other and coexist on canvas, he has expressed the vagueness of our memory and arbitrariness of the surrounding sceneries in everyday life.

Subsequently, he went on to work on “Tracing Newspaper in Paint” using newspaper after producing “from the fraction” and the DVD work “Screened Scenery.” Although the pictures in the newspaper are always surrounded by the text and captions on topical issues, he gives coloring to black and white photographs in monochrome and color photographs in color then covers all the textual information by applying a mat on it so that it is completely concealed.

In the most recent work “Background,” he retouches the old photographs that have been stored at home for a long time. These are the photographs of daily living that is now forgotten. In this series, he deletes the human figures in the photograph and at the same time depicts the scenery behind them based on the information around. The retouched photograph with slight remains of human figures comes along with completely different implication. As heretofore, he returns to the relation between photograph and painting that is based on the visual information, and we still can see his unchanging attitude of questioning the fuzziness of our memory and the existing concept.

Courtesy of Base Gallery