Toru Kamei (亀井徹) is a Japanese artist born in Tokyo in 1976. In occasion of his first monograph, Vanitas, Philippe Codognet wrote: The work of Kamei Toru is (…) very different from most other contemporary Japanese art. He produces complex and intriguing paintings which can be interpreted in many ways and connected to both Western and Eastern art histories, echoing forgotten memories of the Baroque times or the Meiji period, which are however re-mixed with several layers of contemporary sentiments and questions. Kamei’s paintings are indeed figurative and relate to various narratives taken from mythology, allegories, folk tales or religious texts. But their meaning is left ambiguous, open, flexible and polysemic. If his vanitas are hidden self-portraits, some other paintings are clear self-portraits, sometimes reusing stereotypes from Buddhist or Hindu imagery. But he always depicts himself naked, so as to eliminate all references to culture, time and space. Just a human being, naked, extemporal but ephemeral. (…) Most of Kamei’s paintings could in fact be metaphorically considered as concave, that is, hollowed inward, waiting for a spectator to project himself into it to definitively fulfill the whole story. Each artwork is unmistakably a sign that refers to its spectator and calls on him as a witness. (…)
