Artist: Ayako Rokkaku

Curated by Ana Carolina Ralston

With Playful, Stormy, Continuing, Baró presents the first solo exhibition of Ayako Rokkaku in Latin America. Staged as a pop-up at Taller Zaragoza, the exhibition brings together around fifteen paintings, several of them made over the past weeks during the artist’s residency in São Paulo. It also marks Baró’s return to the city where the gallery was founded by Maria Baró in 1999, now operating from Spain with additional spaces in Palma de Mallorca, Paris, and Abu Dhabi.

Rokkaku is self-taught, and her way of working developed independently of any school or tradition. She paints with her hands directly on the canvas, without brushes and without a preparatory drawing to guide her. The motifs emerge as she goes, shaped in real time by the movement of her body across the surface. What results are dense, layered fields of color; figures, landscapes, and creatures that seem to drift between abstraction and figuration, never quite settling into one state or the other.

Recurring across her work are female figures with wide eyes and elongated limbs, closer to a private mythology than to any single reference. Rokkaku has described them as a kind of self-portrait, an extension of the unguarded imagination she associates with childhood.

The paintings borrow something from manga and from Japanese popular culture more broadly, but they resist being reduced to either, they belong, as Maria Baró puts it, “to the traditions of expressionism, gestural abstraction, and Japanese kawaii culture, without being confined to any of them, remaining, above all, resolutely contemporary.”

Painting, for Rokkaku, has always also been something to be watched. Since early in her career she has performed her process live, working in front of an audience rather than in the privacy of a studio. On 20 August, the opening night of the exhibition, she will paint a new work at Taller Zaragoza. “Sometimes people say that watching me paint live feels like meditation,” she has said. “Perhaps because there are no spectacular gestures, only concentration and presence.”

Rokkaku’s paintings have circulated in Brazil before, through Baró’s presentations at the last two editions of SP–Arte, but this is her first opportunity to show a full body of work in the country, and the first made largely on Brazilian ground.