Keisuke Watanabe
About
Keisuke Watanabe, a master draughtsman living and working in Kyoto, Japan, is known for his dynamic and erotic drawings that capture the energy of his models through expressive bodily movement. His work explores passages of time, focusing on intuitively chosen moments that reflect the human body in motion. The artist’s process is deeply influenced by his background as a professional musician, conceiving painting as a temporal art form akin to music. His work, born from classical music, develops under its constant influence, and he creates spontaneously, with quick tempo, as if capturing fleeting thoughts in the air.
Watanabe’s art is characterized by extemporaneous sketching done directly with live models. He favors an expressionist manner, using quick, sensitive lines and blank backgrounds to emphasize the purity of sensation, unclouded by external optics. His works, often ironic and composed of sketches, scrolls, and picture books with naked bodies, are an exciting display of effortless virtuosity and elegance.
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Scrolls
In my paintings, “the life is in the lines.” With a vast paper roll, I make full use of the strokes. I stretch and stretch the movements of my painting, as if they were a flow. The distorted proportions in my paintings are deliberate. With those distortions, I depict the movements of the human body and the passage of time.
In Watanabe's work, the traditional Japanese art form of the scroll plays a pivotal role. However, the artist infuses this classic medium with his own contemporary vision. He creates the scrolls during performances where models move in dance or pose, while he draws their movements live on long rolls of paper. The resulting scrolls, unique and up to 20 meters in length, capture living images of people in motion. The artist seems to capture time in these extended compositions, drawing the viewer into contemplation of the performance itself.
Artworks
