With a background in graphic illustration, Tomoo Gokita brings a level of animation to his paintings, rendered in black and white gouache. Having debuted at Taka Ishii Gallery in Tokyo the year of its creation in 2008, Gokita’s General Emotionality is a stunning example of the artist’s archetypal figures. A large-scale portrait, the painting features a central female figure whose face is obliterated with Neo-Expressionist like abstraction. The figure’s head and shoulders are rendered almost structurally, with extreme lights and darks standing in stark contrast in a sea of grey-scale monochrome. It is precisely this faithfulness to monochrome illustration that makes Gokita’s paintings so unique. As described in the release accompanying the 2008 exhibition, Gokita’s paintings are “graphic re-presentations of paintings… as much ‘about’ the range of possibilities inherent in varying shades of black and white, and the material flatness and contrastingly sharp tones resulting from gouache applied to canvas” (Tomoo Gokita, Taka Ishii Gallery, April 1 – 26, 2008, online). The present work was also exhibited at the artist’s celebrated retrospective The Great Circus which took place in 2014 at the Kawamura DIC Memorial Museum of Art in Sakura.