Child’s Brims is a fun math that guides our first meaningful encounter with the complexities of the world. Projections are shaped by this process, creating a filter that preserves deep ancestral patterns while protecting us from rigid structures imposed on human behavior and expression. As a person grows up in a social system, there is a gradual pressure to conform to these structures that have been affected by the experience of socialization in the codes of a reductive and shared narrative.
Japanese artist otani dismisses art as a form of communication as a repetitive, negative feeling. “The world feels difficult to me, and I often have the feeling that I cannot fully understand everything in it,” tells the artist after the opening of “anima,” his latest exhibition at Perrotin in New York. “The art that shows this world is complex and difficult, but there are moments that feel as simple as the play I experience in childhood through my work.”
The visual naïveté of Otani whimsical sount Files of people The ability of Belie imagination The ability to find information about important things that still carry the meaning. In their clarity and openness, they invite a playful kind of food, evoking the wonder built in the early post-adult period.
Known for his kawailical figures, Otani combines the knowledge of Japanese psychedelic pop with the quality of traditional traditional techniques. In “Anima,” he brings a new body of paintings, bronze scarptures, frps and ceramics that inhabit their symbolic world, offering metaphors that approach the depths of the human condition.
Since 2017, Otani has lived and worked on the remote island of Awaji, off the coast of Japan, where he converted an abandoned ceramic roof factory into a studio. There, in the total-total division, he builds a personal vocabulary without styles or industrial sources, engaging directly with the world, using clay from Shigaraki and gathering memories with renewable materials.
Walter Benjamin’s idea of ”thinking about things” closely parallels Otani’s approach, where ordinary things take on new meanings when viewed “through the eyes of an untainted child.” For children, the material world is endlessly reconstructed, shaped not by naturally occurring structures but by touch, play and development. Benjamin notes that children do not simply imitate the world of adults but reinterpret it, turning discarded objects into raw material for new metaphorical spaces.
Otani’s Ceramic Practice reflects this concept. Clay, for him, holds its way of memory; It reacts, absorbs and changes as it bites. This direct involvement enables him to infuse the property with some emotional currency before any physical exit. His paintings begin as puremic decisions, vessels of lived experience that embody the professional relationship of human beings returning to each other and to the world. “When I look at the finished piece, it feels like the emotions of the moment are coming back to me, and viewers might see something immediate,” she said.
In his extensive work, the sense of play is unmatched. His clay paintings, like his paintings, appear raw, creative and spontaneous, revealing the immediacy of his hand in the act of molding. It is this vital spark – the anifina that gives the show its name – that goes through the work.
“Stats come to me in many different ways,” Otani said. “Some have a clear origin – they can match me or my family members. But there are also unexpected figures that just twist when I twist the paper.”
Clay figures, despite their Wawaii appearance, are fluid, almost ephemeral forms that retain a strong sense of human creativity and presence. Clay itself behaves like a living thing, able to hold traces as they squish, absorb and change the movements of my fingers and hands. “I like the feeling that my thinking is in the body.”
In his paintings, Otani maintains a responsive touch, using a free-flowing process that explores the individuality of the work by shaping and amplifying archetypal forms. These figures become metaphors for human situations and relationships. In this expanded space, the “wonderful” and the “other” – the experience of difference – are embraced with a softness that invites connection rather than isolation.
Aligned with the beautiful Kaikai Kiki Couperflat, Otani’s characters are deliberately open and innocent touching early life – the expression of one’s self. His work recalls Michael Meade’s notion of the ‘mythical imagination,’ dealing with a pre-verbal, metaphorical field, unclaimed by the ordering machines of adult logic. They are fleeting, momentary, childhood-like, where experiences occur with rhythms, emotions, and unexpected flows.
At the same time, Otani’s work maintains a strong sense of kindness and domestic intimacy. In the perrotin exhibition, he presented pieces of cabinets and furniture that became vessels, carrying emotions and recollections that lead us back to wrong ways of understanding. Cupboards, cupboards, curtains and small corners of home life serve as containers for retreats where dreams and bones pile up.
This close connection between memory and thought is central to Otani’s artistic language. “I bring together my experiences and emotional memories that I have developed by studying sculpture, ceramics and painting,” she said. “I hope these human memories and emotions resonate in a universally sympathetic way.” His work, in other words, is an invitation to look at the world with renewed attention through a gentle, colorful lens of curiosity and imagination.
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