What are the hallucination paintings of a Japanese surrealist who is compared to the great Bosch?

2023 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-11-26 05:58

And yet, contemporary surrealist artists never cease to amaze the viewer with their irrepressible imagination, which sometimes does not obey common sense. In our publication there is an incredible gallery of works by a surrealist from Japan. Naoto Hattori … Watch and be amazed at the flight of fantastic thought and artistic skill of the artist, who created images reminiscent of characters from Bosch's paintings and anime.

Remembering the history of the emergence of surrealism, I would like to remind the reader that this trend developed at the beginning of the last century under the great influence of the theory of psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud. The surrealists, working on topics such as eroticism, magic and the subconscious, set their main goal as spiritual elevation and separation of spirit from the material and used phantasmagoric forms, not really thinking about their aesthetic form.

So Naoto Hattori boldly plunges the viewer into a stream of psychedelic metamorphoses, which are often expressed in the form of symbiotic monsters contemplating the world with many hypertrophied eyes. Therefore, looking at his work, we perceive them as something fantastic, despite the fact that surrealism is more connected with the real world than with fantasy.

About creativity

Naoto Hattori is one of the most unusual artists in Japan, whose main focus is pop surrealism. His work differs from European surrealists in that he adds a little traditional Japanese painting and modern techniques of his country to the usual direction. In his works, you can often see images of anime and plots related to Japanese mythology.

However, the influence of the European sur on the work of the Japanese master is very great. Many experts agree that the style of some of Naoto Hattori's works resembles those of Bosch and Archimboldo. And this is an indisputable fact. He, like the great masters of the past, paints his surreal paintings, balancing on the verge of beauty and horror.

It is also worth noting that the Japanese artist uses the acrylic technique in his work and often uses the DigitalART (computer art) technique. He paints fantastic female portraits, creates images of hybrid creatures with huge eyes, which reflect real landscapes, as well as phantasmagoric plots with characters that literally horrify and attract attention with their sophistication.

The appearance of the things depicted by the artist misleads the viewer, since he takes for reality only what he sees in real life. And this does not mean at all that the artist turns everything upside down, on the contrary - he says that he is trying to show the true world, which the deceptive everyday life hides from us.

But it is precisely the disclosure of things, states, emotions, feelings, sensations, thoughts, experiences hidden from sight that all surrealist artists are engaged in.

Goggle-eyed hybrids

In many of the works of the Japanese master of an illustrative nature, one can see small fluffy animals with a considerable degree of imagination and some unnatural hybridization and huge eyes. Hattori says that this is exactly what he sees in his mind, moreover, starting from the age of three.

Hattori continued to paint eyes as he grew up and when he earned a Bachelor of Arts in Illustration from the School of Visual Arts. The artist always says that the creatures in the paintings are a figment of fantasy, emerging from the world of his imagination.

These acrylic paintings are small in size, typically less than 7.5cm x 7.5cm without a frame, says the artist.

Surrealism in female images

The works of the Japanese artist in the genre of surrealist portrait are no less interesting. Moreover, he paints exclusively female portraits, incredibly graceful and fantastic. Thanks to the texture, they look very mysterious and very original.

The artist himself says about his work as follows:

A few words about the Japanese artist

Naoto Hattori was born in 1975 in Yokohama, Japan. Childhood was spent surrounded by traditional Japanese arts, which the neighbors used to make a living. As a teenager, he got acquainted with modern painting and became interested in cosmopolitanism, street art, and graffiti. After graduating from high school, he moved to Tokyo, where he studied graphic design. Then he moved to New York, where he studied at the School of Visual Arts. He received his bachelor's degree in 2000.

Naoto Hattori received the New York Art Club Illustrators Society Award, New York Art Directors Club, Communication Arts. Then he won many art competitions. His work has been consistently published in numerous prestigious glossy magazines. Today Hattori is a regular participant in numerous exhibitions in the USA and Japan.

Continuing the theme of Japanese surrealist painters, read our publication: The alarming truth and despair in the paintings of the Japanese surrealist Tetsuya Ishida.