Koharutie — L’Enfant du Printemps — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: May 27 → July 2, 2011

Bruised Innocence

“Oh, dear children of men,on whatever island, in whatever place you live, whichever name you bear, hear this: The God of Heaven and Earth that supports your body and soul calls us all in one love.”

Jacob Boehme

The essence of childhood is a reflection of passion. In other words, to live every moment of existence as if it could be the last. This is why children do not live exactly in the same world as adults, but rather in an erotic space where dreams mingle with reality without clearly differentiating the two terms. This, without a doubt, is the reason why the drawings of Koharutie not only show the image of a little girl with a bruised heart, but also the struggle of innocence fighting against nightmares through which is penetrating, little by little, the horror of adulthood.

“If I use my emotions and life force as the earth, and the seeds that I water, then, on paper, that which must blossom will blossom. That which must be born will be born.”

Dipping his brush into the thousand and one colors of his emotionality, each work of Koharutie’s is first and foremost the result of a soul that has chosen not to renounce his internal truth. Using drawing as a tool to understand himself, the metamorphoses of the infantile figures who haunt his universe are images that reveal the multiple tragedies that run through the heart of this poetic artist.

“For me, who observes, if the children are sad, I am as well, I am sad. If the children suffer, me too, I suffer. The children project themselves in me and therefore I return as a child.”

With the face sometimes crowned by a catfish, other times penetrated by a skull, whatever the events that affected these figures of such tender age, one thing remains roughly the same: no matter the degree of suffering or the violence of visions that imprison them, it is always the most human part of ourselves that these images arouse—that their innocence awakens. As Jacob Boehme so eloquently stated: “Children are our schoolmasters; even with all our wisdom we are crazy compared to them.”

Born in 1977 in Japan. Koharutie lives & works in Hiroshima.

Exploring the emotional other side of illustrations for children, Koharutie transgresses the codes of a genre to invent a new one: Emo-Pop Art, or the art of giving shape to one’s anguish from images made to express any other feeling. Mixing the most fecund naiveté and the strictest introspection, the works thus created represent the paradoxes of our time.

Koharutie (in English, ‘the Spring child’) tries to turn his child’s wounds into the starting point of a renewal.