GR gallery is pleased to announce Anonymous Heroes, the second solo exhibition of Japanese artist Shigeki Matsuyama with the gallery, from February 16 until March 9, 2024. A total of 12 new works, executed with the artist signature technique, will be included in the show. With a fondness for the exciting and disturbing emotional fluxes that charge inconspicuousness in the virtual world, Anonymous Heroes acts as a portrait, at times even a critique, to those intemperate moments of pharisaic ostentation hidden behind a screen. Analyzing and depicting, Matsuyama weaves dystopian influences with the autobiographical to compose imaginative scenes imbued with realism. This series grows out of the artist’s inspiration taken from things and perceptions around him, things like an omnipresent sense of unease and distrust towards new media like Internet and social media.
Matsuyama takes a rational approach on how each of his work is depicted, focusing on the vast expansion of technology and on how it affects the consciousness of everyday life in our society. This peculiar new body of work is themed on individuals who are known for their virtual personae and on-line presence, imposing their own egoistical sense of justice onto others, hypocritically judging and criticizing without revealing their identity; consequentially all the works feature their subjects as masked superheroes, mimicking the characters righteous behavior. Their faces are hidden behind a mask, these characters are our modern-day heroes, using the superpowers of the Internet to preach their subjective justice to the masses, leading them on a self-righteous crusade.
To better understand Matsuyama’s concept behind this new series, we quote his words: "A portrait is a depiction of a specific individual. It became an established style of painting during the Renaissance, and since then, many artists have created portraits with a wide variety of themes. Some portraits have pursued realism while others have emphasized the beauty or exaggerated the ugliness of their subjects. The series Portrait of dazzle uses facial photos found among the countless selfies uploaded on the Internet. With a video projector, the eyes from the photos were projected and traced onto a silhouette of another person, whose race, sex, hairstyle, or body shape differs from those of the original, thereby creating portraits reflecting anonymity and the uncertain veracity of information on the Internet."
