PARIS.- For years now, exhibitions of Takashi Murakami’s work have come to resemble family reunions or new episodes of a long- lasting television series. Or at least they share certain qualities with them—in particular, a cast of familiar and endearing characters who reappear in different forms, depending on the context and the medium (sculpture, painting, or video). Smiling flowers, mischievous looking character with two ears, mushrooms with dozens of eyes—the (often very popular) mascots invented by the Japanese artist over the last three decades awaken upon each new occasion, revealing in different spaces and presentations new facets of his bountiful imagination. This imagination is like an extraordinary garden where, as if in a parallel dimension, all these beings live together and give free rein to their emotions. While some of them seem to make trouble, carried away by anger or harmless lunacy, most of them express an infectious joy in a carefree spirit—certainly the source of the powerful appeal Murakami’s work holds.

This approach is quite visible at Perrotin, where the artist has a new solo show this autumn. It brings together many of Murakami's favorite characters, which seem to form a group although they are on separate wood panels. Among them we recognize the zany octopus that the artist regularly wears as a hat, a maiko, and a young woman in a minidress, all stylized like manga drawings. We also find Miss Good Things and Mr. Bad Things, two little beings who are inseparable opposites, the kawaii version of symbols of good and evil. This eclectic cast of characters would not be complete without the famous Murakami’s panda and Mr. DOB who started it all, the artist’s first icon and a leitmotif of his work ever since his first appearance in 1996. Here this animal is decorated with multicolored stripes and accompanied by his offspring. He seems to have stepped out of a children’s cartoon or a hallucinatory psychedelic trip.

Therein lies the very essence of the artistic ambiguity of Murakami’s transgressive, iconoclastic work. In the early 2000s, the artist (who was born in 1962) theorized the Superflat movement, a kind of Japanese neo-pop art combining advertising practices and popular culture with the aesthetic of Japanese animated films in colorful, two dimensional artworks. He simultaneously referenced artistic canons to criticize consumer society with caustic humor. Murakami painted characters on wood panels and cut them out, creating “shaped canvases.” Those new paintings where the creature escaped from its background unmistakably evoked brand mascots and logos, turning up on stickers, packaging, advertising posters, and TV ads.

For instance, a painting in this exhibition that is barely fifty centimeters high depicts a darling lion cub, the Yume Lion, whose head is surrounded by a diagram with the seven colors of the rainbow, forming his mane. This lion was created by Murakami as the mascot for the Japanese TV station, TOKYO MX, and in 2010, the lion figure took the form of a large gold and aluminum statue at the entrance to Versailles. The artist has since created a stuffed animal and has even written a children’s book about him. This is the perfect example of the kind of mascot that is frequently recontextualized in different artworks, becoming a theme and transcending the work of his creator, even beyond the art world. Many fashion labels, musicians, and designers have fallen for Murakami’s favorite characters, inspiring numerous collaborations.

But for Murakami, who is now over 60, the “mascots” do not always have two eyes, a nose, and a mouth. Representing the variety of his inspirations, the selection of artworks shown at Perrotin includes two circular paintings with dozens of colorful flowers. Overt homages to the prints of Ogata Kôrin, the great seventeenth-century painter, they recall Murakami’s keen interest in the art history of his country. In fact, as a student, he specialized in nihonga, a traditional style of Japanese painting. Here, flowers appear on tondos, round canvases that recall the Italian Renaissance, and are covered with gold leaf, platinum leaf, and spangles. This series of works has been developed over the past twenty years and demonstrates the artist's acknowledged syncretism, combining cultures, eras, and also genres, “desecrating” sacred art with elements of contemporary kitsch.

With ZuZaZaZaZaZa Rainbow, Murakami also refers to more recent art history, particularly to abstract painting of the mid-twentieth century. On a row of seven colored vertical bands, the same trace of white liquid is splashed on each solid surface. This motif recalls Murakami’s series of “bodily fluids” from the late 90s, when he featured ambiguous splashes on his paintings and sculptures, recalling Ellsworth Kelly, Lucio Fontana, Barnett Newman, and, of course, Jackson Pollock, who made drips of paint on canvas his iconic artistic principle.

Duplicated, recontextualized, or even updated and rearranged, Murakami's favorite characters make this exhibition something of a “greatest hits” where everyone can identify familiar figures. As they share the exhibition space, they invite visitors to compose their own narratives by making the artist’s imaginary world their own. These icons symbolize different moments in Murakami’s career and combine them completely naturally. Having always been obsessed with the icons that inhabit our collective unconscious, Murakami has managed to create his own icons that are now internationally known.

They include a self-portrait of the artist alongside POM, the dog who was always with him from 2006 to her death in 2020. This flesh-and- blood mascot reminds us how much the artist’s work—however fantastic and colorful it may be—always explores the tenuous link between dreams and reality. With his exaggeratedly large head, blueish hair, and foolish grin, the artist's face seems to express wonder at the beings that surround him in the gallery—like the mirror of a man who always has his head in the clouds of his imaginary world.
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Matthieu Jacquet, art critic