Tetsuya Ishida died, a possible suicide, under the wheels of a train in 2005, aged 31. He studied design and illustration at university and differentiated his design work from his "superior illustrations", seen in this exhibition, which were done ostensibly for himself.
His intricate paintings imagine daily scenes from a melancholic, technically adept but emotionally deprived world. His composite humanoid figures - sometimes part-man, part-animal, part-machine - were, significantly, painted in mock resemblance of himself.
These carefully rendered paintings envision Japan and its ritualised consumerism in scenes of nonchalant perversity but are told in familiar settings of conformity. Horror author Ramsey Campbell described Japan-born British writer Kazuo Ishiguro's 2005 novel as a "classic instance of a story that's horrifying precisely because the narrator doesn't think it is." Likewise, Ishida creates imagery that almost passes as normal. A reading of Ishiguro's book, with its dystopian portrayal of a world that harvests humans for their body parts, is a literary equivalent and reflects closest the awfulness of Ishida's painted world.
