PCN Art Brut Series No. 23, Artwork Description.

Abstract

The artist lost his father by suicide when he was five years old. He discovered his father's photograph at the age of fifteen, and since then he began to suffer from insomnia, gradually manifesting abnormal experiences, which eventually lead to the onset of schizophrenia. He has been hospitalized a number of times for referential ideation and delusions of grandeur that he was God. While he sometimes became unwell in reaction to trivial actions or changes in his environment, his condition has been generally stable and currently he visits a hospital in Oita Prefecture from a group home, where he continues his creative activities. Since his childhood, when his father committed suicide, he has been drawing as his life's work, and his style varies widely. When he creates, he tries to express his emotions at the given moment, says the artist. In this piece, there are two islands, each of which is made up of an accumulation of numerous figures. The figures include animals such as rabbits and cats, buildings such as houses and factories, what looks like human faces with various expressions, and geometric shapes. Take a close look and you can see the overlap between images. The overlap of the images brings the anteroposterior and horizontal relationships to the viewer's awareness, which naturally gives a touch of three-dimensionality to the islands. This three-dimensionality, combined with the sense of unreality brought about by the gold in the margins, makes these islands appear to be floating in some kind of space rather than in the sea. Or perhaps, given the similarity of the components of the two islands, one might represent a form of the other that has transformed over time, or that has even transcended the space as we know it.