Presenting Tomoo Gokita’s instantly-recognisable geometric forms in a striking grayscale palette, Sham Marriage, 2013, exudes the mystery and wit that have come to define the artist’s highly graphic oeuvre. Rendered with amalgamated zigzags and congruous angles, the painting delineates the anonymous silhouettes of a man and a woman over a subtle gradation of black and grey. Precisely achieved with acrylic gouache and charcoal on linen, the composition bathes in a textural complexity that is reflective of Gokita’s rigorous practice, whereby ‘there’s nothing haphazard — not even an accidental drip’ (Tomoo Gokita, quoted in ‘Tomoo Gokita’s painterly coup’, The Japan Times, 11 September 2014, online).

Sourcing imagery from soft-core erotic magazines, vintage album covers and mainstream television, Gokita appropriates the distorted bodily archetypes that pervade popular media, and transforms them into abstract, supernatural incarnations. Spanning Cubism, Surrealism, Pop art and mass media, Sham Marriage’s multifarious visual references are emblematic of the artist’s ability to engage in dialogue with distinctive currents of image production. While the woman’s tiny cartoonish eyes set against a neo-expressionist smear of paint are redolent of Roy Lichtenstein’s comic-infused oeuvre, the smoothness of the composition’s gradient-formed backdrop suggests methods of photographic focus utilised in commercial billboards. Employing a visual language akin to that of advertising, Gokita tackles the age-old genre of portraiture in ultra-contemporary terms, imparting it with a sense of glamour that challenges the traditional tenets of painterly representation. The artist’s expert use of light, displaying an array of dramatic contrasts, additionally reflects his fondness for photography and film, and takes on, along with an arresting chiaroscuro quality, the visual countenance of a film noir.

Operating within a larger art historical tradition of hybrid representation, Gokita explores the indistinct border that separates realism from abstraction. Like Gerhard Richter’s photo-realist canvases made in the late 1960s, Gokita’s idiosyncratic work builds upon existing imagery, and subsequently undergoes intentional camouflage through a masterful manipulation of paint. Expanding upon the variation of a single gradient, Gokita summons the aesthetic of a bygone era, much like Richter highlighted the temporal gap between reality and its representation in his blurred, almost faded chromatic paintings. The subversive property of Richter’s work suffuses his palette with an enticing quality that is redolent of Gokita’s dexterously shaded tones, which, as noted by prominent art critic Roberta Smith, scintillate in ways that ‘make black-and-white feel like living colour’ (Roberta Smith, ‘Stranger Town: Invading Genres Breach the Art World’s Porous Borders’, The New York Times, 9 March 2005).

Brimming with mesmerising detail and graphic-like smoothness, Sham Marriage heralds a theme that has enthralled artists across time. Touching upon the timeless subject of coupledom, the present work finds precedent in the myriad of portraits that have examined the bond tying spouses or romantic partners, namely Grant Wood’s American Gothic, Pablo Picasso’s Saltimbanques, and René Magritte’s Les Amants. Shrouding lovers in white cloth, Magritte’s iconic painting Les Amants has been understood as a comment on the complex nature of romantic intimacy, blending notions of exposure and repression. This reading could similarly be applied to Gokita’s Sham Marriage, as the depicted duo’s vague, hazy features summon questions on what lies behind the visible surface. The work’s revelatory title, Sham Marriage, further complicates the apparent simplicity of the spouses’ merged representation.

Executed a year before his breakthrough exhibition The Great Circus at the Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art, the present work reflects the formal dexterity and seductive quality that propelled Gokita’s oeuvre into the global spotlight. A delectable example of the artist’s unique practice, Sham Marriage successfully coalesces the formal qualities that permeate his beguiling and atmospheric oeuvre.