Japanese draughtsman and painter, born in 1963. He lives and works in Tokyo.
Life
Daisuke Ichiba began painting seriously in the 1980s. In 1990 he self-published his first book, 37 Year Old Bastard, and has since published roughly one book a year, outside mainstream publishing and institutional circuits. His work caught the attention of the manga artist Takashi Nemoto and of Pakito Bolino of the Marseille workshop Le Dernier Cri. He is shown by several galleries in France and the United States.
The Galerie Arsenic devoted a first major monograph to him, Daisuke Ichiba, l’art d’équilibrer les dissonances, with a preface by Philippe Dagen and a long analysis by Xavier-Gilles Néret, who places his work between the Japanese and French underground graphic scenes.
The work
Trained in printmaking, he mostly draws in black, keeping colour for a few details. His images, at once violent and delicate, draw on Japanese folklore (supernatural creatures, samurai), horror cinema, otaku countercultures, manga, Art Brut and collage. Schoolgirls grappling with monsters, decomposing or beheaded bodies, ghosts, three-eyed or headless hybrid beings: youth and sex mingle there with corruption and death. He himself says he projects into them “chaos, anarchy, anguish, the grotesque, the absurd and the irrational”.