Watanabe’s works, in pursuit of the truth of expression, are often set against backdrops of copied masterpieces from art history.
“In making works that are themselves about the works of others, I am casting doubt on the very illusion of the ‘original work,’” he states. In today’s society, where the originality of expression is exalted, his words strike an unexpected chord.
Yet the French deconstructionist Jacques Derrida once observed: when human beings attempt to make the unconscious conscious through language, difference inevitably arises, and the origin of expression is already lost. In other words, whether in words or in pigments, whatever is manifested is but a copy of the unseen that has been made visible.
Every act of expression is therefore a likeness of a primal image, and the claim that the source of a copy is the “original” is nothing more than a convention shaped by historical circumstance. As evidence of this, Watanabe declares: “In the world of images, everything is accessible, and nothing is forbidden. I look upon the images of other painters as a landscape painter gazes at nature, and I play with them.”
His muses are his two daughters, who often appear in school uniforms. Each girl crosses freely between reality and fantasy, continuing an endless adventure in a vividly colored world. Through his exceptional power of depiction and his unique critical perspective, Watanabe has expanded the scope of contemporary Japanese art.
His paintings are open fields of liberated imagination, transgressing masterpieces while simultaneously embracing the viewer’s freedom of interpretation. In this way, Watanabe both attains and bestows the freedom of imagination.