Tomiyuki Sakuta

Sakura’s figures, usually displayed under a series of female names, blend personalities with the style and shape of a natural form — the combination returning a surreal and shrouded portrait with allegories to folk or fantasy. The intaglio-printed tree form of ‘Carole’ is one of Sakura’s more whimsical creations, the bulging eyes and dashing feet looping into a lineage of character storytelling from Japanese anime to the fables that inspired them, the artist playfully exercising a sense of motion that allows a particularly compelling visual description — the branches whipping backwards and feet blurring in their hurry.

Via Intaglio print, Japanese artist Sakura wrests for portraits that combine a strange and shaded fantasy with adroit technical skill. “Alison 2”s human physiognomy is countered by an overall fruit-like appearance, creating a vying of familiar and surreal that gives the work a mysterious and dark underpinning. Sakura inserts a dramatic level of textural detail into the grain of the flesh and leaves through a painstaking process of thin scratches with a needle into the copper printing plate, the process inducing a state of deep, vague and meditative thought which often transitions into the realisation of the result.

Sakura’s figures, usually displayed under a series of female names, blend personalities with the style and shape of a natural form — the combination returning a surreal and shrouded portrait with allegories to folk or fantasy. The intaglio-printed tree form of ‘Carole’ is one of Sakura’s more whimsical creations, the bulging eyes and dashing feet looping into a lineage of character storytelling from Japanese anime to the fables that inspired them, the artist playfully exercising a sense of motion that allows a particularly compelling visual description — the branches whipping backwards and feet blurring in their hurry.

Human and plant biological motifs are often equidistant in Sakura’s visual profiles, the artist meditating on his subjects for long periods both before and during the process of creation, each print made through delicate and intricately laced lines etched methodically into the printing plate. As such, “Dodog” is an image fortified with the existential weight of such a meditative process, and finds a profound beauty loaded with a creeping sense of tension from his subject matter; one of a series of works based on individuals the artist has met or is close to. The mouth of this figure stretches and combines in layers to suggest the petals of a fleshy flower, the curl of the lips particularly reminiscent of carnivorous pitcher plantlife, or the exotic shape of an orchid.

A part of the “Friends & Faces” series, “Flower of Legs” marks a rare departure away from the portrait for Sakura — though many other hallmarks of his work remain intact. The loose assembly of body and plant as a single, harmonised image is lent an eerie undertone with skilled use of tone and framing — the legs appearing dismembered, but arranged in the form of the flower under a soft glow.

Liberating portraiture from strict representation, Sakura uses his prints to reflect on internal conflicts and fantasies, harmonising those perceptions with the image to create a portrayal that acknowledges its own subjectivity — and searches for a universal emotive language. The surrealist abstraction of “Tomas” reduces down to a repetition of mouths and lips (particularly pouting and suggestively female) and extols a wonderment that might topple into obsessiveness over this one trait — or clarifies a personality to its single, definitive point.