Ayako Rokkaku’s paintings are recognisable through her intense and vibrant colour palette of pinks, yellows, blues and greens. These explosive rainbow-toned paintings are littered with flowers, illustrations of female characters and cats, imbuing a childlike, dreamy and impressionistic quality.
The female figures in Rokkaku’s paintings are stylised, with large eyes and long limbs, mimicking the style of Japanese manga in visuals, tones and expressions. Rokkaku’s fascination with young female personas stems from her admiration of the boundlessness of a child’s imagination. Often untitled, her paintings have depicted these characters frolicking in fields, resting and dancing.
Apart from these female figures, Rokkaku has also painted abstract scenes, combining various elements and symbols such as arrows, cars and ribbons alongside outbursts of colour.
Process
Rokkaku adopts a unique approach to working on her paintings. Her large-scale canvasses, reaching as wide as 23 feet, are painted entirely with her fingertips. In doing so, Rokkaku’s compositions have a certain organic dynamism that separates her work from contemporaries such as Yoshitomo Nara and Takashi Murakami.
While its output is two-dimensional, her work has also become performative as she often works in front of an audience without initial plans or sketches, painting purely on intuition. Apart from canvas, Rokkaku has also utilised different materials such as cardboard, acetate and vintage Louis Vuitton suitcases.
