Last spring\u2019s survey of H. R. Giger\u2019s work announced Lomex\u2019s investment in underscoring the extraordinary influence that artists who are beloved beyond gallery or museum walls have had on contemporary visual cultures. The Birth of Myth<\/em> continues this conversation, offering a tribute to Amano and exhibiting the legendary artist in New York City for the first time in two decades. On display are a series of grand new oil paintings depicting scenes that flicker as if on the edges of a half-remembered dream. Centaurs, warriors, dragons, unicorns, monsters, goddesses, and other fantastic beings swirl through these works. We encounter unfolding dramas that call to mind mythological universes both familiar and unknown. In one painting, an electric blue warrior confronts two shadowy figures who resemble Final Fantasy IV<\/em>\u2019s dark knight protagonist, Cecil Harvey, yet these entities could just as easily belong to other fantasies. The glacial colour palette of these paintings, tending towards soft blues, greys, and yellows balanced by brilliant saturation, enshrouds these works in mist. Amano appears to prefer a thinner application of his oil paint, and as a result his works shimmer with a liquid dynamism that recalls the watercolours he is better known for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Accustomed to encountering Amano\u2019s illustrations floating through the blank space of a website or glossy magazine page, I was startled to witness his visions contained within the boundaries of a canvas. In their scale and with the use of oil paint, these works closely resemble Amano’s smaller works, yet nonetheless seem to insist upon their form as paintings<\/em>. Are they also insisting upon their status as \u201cfine art\u201d? Here, one might consider Amano\u2019s previous foray into the United States art world. In the late 1990s, Amano bought a loft in SoHo and, alongside a team of marketing executives, planned a campaign to establish himself in New York that culminated in a 1997 exhibition at the Puck Building. As a contemporaneous New York Magazine<\/em> article suggested, the art world cognoscenti were bemused by Amano\u2019s ambitions.1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 1 <\/a> - Lang Phipps, \u201cIs Amano the Best Artist You\u2019ve Never Heard Of? (Or Just the Latest Barnum of SoHo?),\u201d New York Magazine<\/em>, October 6, 1997, 44\u201348, 98.<\/span> Rather than underscoring a desire to \u201cpass\u201d into fine arts, though, I think the show asks us to consider continuities in Amano\u2019s career that destabilize these divisions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The works presented in Lomex\u2019s other exhibition space, spilling beyond canvas and page, helpfully nuance Amano\u2019s aesthetic philosophy. Accompanying concept art from the 1985 animated film Angel\u2019s Egg<\/em> are a series of newer sumi drawings that demonstrate Amano\u2019s mastery over brush and paper. Languid female figures drift through the air, summoning the motifs of the Pre-Raphaelites or Vienna Secession while suggesting a conversation with Japanese art past and present. These works are paired with another tribute to Amano\u2019s career: a series of Dean & DeLuca shopping bags, straight from 1997, that Amano used as improvised surfaces for painting. On one bag, a pair of legs in black Spandex and red heels looms over a leaking pear, a whip dangling between them. In another, a white-faced figure slides the Dean & DeLuca logo into her mouth. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The bags are playful and poppy, resembling something like visual poems, and betray little sense of irony or cynicism. Instead, they recall something of the energy of Amano\u2019s 1990s advertising campaign, in which he and his team pasted posters with aphoristic sayings on the subway and rented a downtown billboard to depict an enigmatic message to the city: \u201cThink like Amano.\u201d What it means to \u201cthink like Amano\u201d is to allow universes to blossom across the matter of everyday life. Forgoing mimetic representation, Amano instead projects his imagination onto the surfaces of world around him, whether those include shopping bags or, in this exhibition, the white walls of the gallery space itself. Painted fish swim along the perimeter of this room, while in a corner, a swordsman glares from the edge of a door. These works helped me understand that the significance of Amano may lie not in his consecration as a \u201cfine artist\u201d but in the way that he dissolves such distinctions. Fine art and illustration, canvas and world, and reality and dream\u2013\u2013Amano provokes us to question these dichotomies, and it\u2019s time that he be recognized for his profound influence on contemporary visual cultures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Writer Connor Spencer is based in New York City. A PhD student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, he is interested in queer and trans studies, critical theory, and Marxist approaches to aesthetic objects.<\/p>\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/web_oct_Spencer_Yoshitaka-Amano_YA2382_Poseidon_1.jpg\")
Poseidon<\/em>, 2023.
Photo: courtesy of the artist & Lomex, New York<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Yoshitaka-Amano\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/web_oct_Spencer_Yoshitaka-Amano_YA2381_Perseus-II_1.jpg\")
Perseus II<\/em>, 2023.
Photo: courtesy of the artist & Lomex, New York<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Yoshitaka-Amano\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/web_oct_Spencer_Yoshitaka-Amano_YA2367_sm.jpg\")
Time and Light<\/em>, 2023.
Photo: courtesy of the artist & Lomex, New York<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"Yoshitaka-Amano\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/web_oct_Spencer_Yoshitaka-Amano_YA2395_framed.jpg\")
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Dean & Deluca Bag 4, 2, 5, 11, 10<\/em> & 12<\/em>, 1997.
Photos: courtesy of the artist & Lomex, New York<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Yoshitaka-Amano\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/web_oct_Spencer_Yoshitaka-Amano_YA23104_framed.jpg\")
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