– Versione italiana a pagina 2 –
Light and shadow alternate in the paintings of Keita Morimoto, Japanese artist born in Osaka in 1990, who moved to Canada in 2006, where he studied at the Ontario College of Art & Design, before returning to Tokyo in 2021 during the lockdown. There, he began exploring the techniques and themes of Baroque painting and early twentieth-century American realism.
Light is the true protagonist of his works: it illuminates and colors fast-food signs, telephone booths, shop windows, snack vending machines, convenience stores, neighborhoods, neon signs, and storefronts that fill static, time-suspended landscapes, transforming the most marginal and commercial urban spaces into evocative environments. Light also plays a central role in his depiction of nature: it appears in the skies above cities that seem either asleep or on the verge of waking, at dusk or at sunrise.
Morimoto reinterprets the chiaroscuro of premodern genre painting in a personal way, creating environments that captivate the viewer’s attention.
An example is the painting Evening Embers (2025), in which Morimoto depicts a glimpse of a Tokyo neighborhood and chooses as his subject a shop window, something that might otherwise go unnoticed. Lit from within and accompanied by a few streetlights in the background, the window is interpreted as a portal, in line with the premodern aesthetic in which the painting is seen as a “window” capable of transporting us into another dimension. Golden fragments illuminate the pigment laid on the canvas and reflect the light, contrasting with the shadows of the darker colors surrounding them.
This detail also appears in the painting Jewel Box (2024), where the main subject is an anonymous-looking woman walking past a display window filled with shelves and objects. As one moves closer to the canvas, it becomes apparent that the surface is crossed by a dense network of broken brushstrokes, placed side by side, creating a hypnotic pixelated effect.
Whether depicting interior or exterior settings, his works portray moments of life that are barely perceptible in everyday experience. Motionless figures, immersed in an apparent silence and deep introspection, invite the viewer to feel involved and present.
Recently, Keita Morimoto’s works were exhibited at KOTARO NUKAGA in Tennoz, Japan, in the show What We Told Ourselves, where the artist presented large-scale canvases and shared with the public his first physical installation, titled Encounter (2026).
Morimoto’s works have been shown in some of the most important galleries around the world, from Toronto to Milan, from New York to Copenhagen, and from Los Angeles to Berlin, captivating and engaging curious audiences across different countries.
