Kentaro Okumura

Kentaro Okumura captures the people and places of his everyday life, yet he prioritizes the impression of a scene over precise form. His paintings convey the fluidity of experience, whether depicting a stretch of Scottish coastline, a Nairobi chang’aa brewery, or an interior in London, reflecting the continual shifts of his own perception and subjectivity. Okumura applies paint in a layered, mesh-like manner. Thick yet airy, his brushstrokes leave trails of pigment that suggest texture and movement. The final layers are draped rather than flattened, forming a network of intersecting marks that gradually resolve into recognizable imagery—reminiscent of a net crusted with salt, both structured and ephemeral. Drawing on his upbringing between China and Japan and his current life in London, Okumura develops a personal visual vocabulary of signs and symbols, which function as carriers of thought and feeling. His work engages with a long-standing dialogue in painting, exploring the tension between representation and abstraction, while maintaining a sensitive attention to memory, perception, and the transience of lived experience. ...