“There is a fusion of contemporary cartoon animation and ancient mythology in Matsuanaga’s paintings. They show us the shapes and attributes of what we might call Modern Gods.” (Morgan Falconer, RA Magazine 2002) I am interested in the tension between reality and fiction in the everyday, where the fairy-tale seeps through guiding and revealing a dimension fused with the magical and spiritual. Books and films of fantasy, Science Fiction, mythologies and Japanese comics (Manga) inform my paintings and merge around the figures I paint. Everyday images collected from magazines, newspapers and photographs I have taken are used as starting points and are morphed into something otherworldly. Through the slow process of painting, I become far more involved into the images, nurturing the ordinary figures into revealing the entities existing in a magical or spiritual world. There are always latent figures around the figure, waiting to be reincarnated. It is as if we all have a slight different version of us in endless dimensions and they are like ghosts always with us echoing around us. The cycle of life and death in the theme of reincarnation is an important aspect of my work. This spiritual dimension is entwined in our everyday reality and the voices of lives coming in and out of life are always around us. The way how I reveal them is often by focusing on something about the figure, such as the way they hold themselves, their hairstyle, dress, facial expression. All these carry the person’s persona, value, or aspect of personalities. I transmute them to the extent that it starts to overwhelm the figure itself making it turn into something unreal. They often feel they take the shape of Shamans, Witches, Oracles, Medicine-Men but also the figures from the mythological world of Minotaurs, Satyr, Imps and Nympths. Mythology itself is full of stories of metamorphosis and I use its narrative to navigate the direction of the transformation in my paintings. I believe that human contains an almost metallic space deep within, where rainbow rises up, the moon and the stars are revolving and the suns are bursting into flames. This is where the pathways open to something cosmic and beyond human – It is the critical point where human conditions start to dissolve. In order to come closer to there, my figures of human are combined with mythological entities by which they are reincarnated. 2005

Showcomplex - Rui Matsunaga: Artist Statement
All information property of the Artist. Please do not reproduce without permission.
To contact Rui Matsunaga, please use the email page.