AKIINOUE is pleased to present Current Position, a solo exhibition by Tat Ito, opening on July 25.

AKIINOUE is pleased to present Current Position, a solo exhibition by Tat Ito, opening on July 25.

Tat Ito was born in 1978 in Nagoya, Aichi, and is currently based in Tokyo. He received his BFA in Painting from the Academy of Art University, San Francisco in 2005, and his MFA in Painting from the New York Academy of Art in 2008. During his time in the United States, Ito developed a daily practice of visiting museums and copying masterworks, an experience that became foundational to his artistic practice and continues to inform his work today.

Ito’s practice centers on the construction of what he calls “social history paintings” that reflect the times in which we live. Referencing classical compositions and imagery from art history—such as those by Veronese, Poussin, and Jacques-Louis David—he borrows the dramatic formats of mythological and religious painting to connect contemporary human activity to a historical scale.

The figures that appear in his paintings are not gods or heroes, but contemporary young people who could be found anywhere. They embody both explosive, dynamic energy and a fragile delicacy that seems as though it could collapse at any moment. This sense of instability and imbalance reflects the condition of our present moment—an era shaped by the rapid rise of new technologies, suspended between possibility and uncertainty.

In scenes such as festivals and events, these figures emerge as distinct individuals, each rendered with careful attention to clothing and detail. Yet, as they are gradually absorbed into social atmospheres, structures, shared values, and unconscious norms, they transform into something else entirely—a “crowd imbued with peer pressure.”

This process, in which individuals shift into the larger, inescapable system of the crowd, extends beyond a simple depiction of groups. It points to the very condition of human existence in contemporary society: a tension in which individual agency is maintained while simultaneously being shaped and homogenized by invisible forces. This dynamism is clearly visualized within Ito’s paintings, where the unseen social rules we unconsciously encounter in everyday life—also suggested through the decorative patterns and motifs that frequently appear across the pictorial surface—emerge as an ongoing human drama.

At the same time, the scenes depicted often evoke a sense of nostalgia, recalling fragments of the Shōwa era. These atmospheres originate in the artist’s own childhood memories and, through nostalgic color palettes and painterly gestures, create a space where reality and imagination intersect. Within this space, layers of human experience, memory, and perception overlap, giving rise to a shifting sense of time.

This exhibition, Ito’s first solo presentation with AKIINOUE, features 14 recent paintings developed through these approaches. All works are rendered on square canvases, pointing to the structures through which images are received and shared in contemporary society.