Ryo Toyonaga: Surrealist Painter of the Cartoon Apocalypse

The first time I laid eyes on Ryo Toyonaga's work, I was at the peak of an acid trip. Which in retrospect is probably the best way to understand and appreciate his oeuvre. I went expecting the usual 'gallery trip'. To sit and stare at paintings until my ego dissolves and no distinction exists between myself and whatever the artwork depicts. I didn't count on that artwork being this far outside of my experience.

I was at once stricken by the absurd, alien beauty of it. Recognizable 1930s-1940s cartoon pipes, Mickey Mouse shoes, knobs, and other bits and bobs taken straight from early Disney comprise everything from the landscape to the bodies of the bizarre creatures which inhabit it.

What is any of it made out of? Even the metal brackets the pipes mount to don't appear to be rigid, but instead some sort of foam. Whatever cartoon characters are made out of? "Toon matter"? The bodies of his creatures are often just huge misshapen blobs of meat. Their legs arranged as if to imply haste? The sort of triskelion style spinning run of a cartoon character peeling out, in a hurry to get somewhere.

The meat is a subject for study itself. Is it really meat? It seems to be. Here and there it has what are either orifices or the places where limbs or heads were sliced off, leaving only a gaping hole. Piled up in jiggling heaps within the ruins of buildings, or boiling and bulging out the windows of what are ostensibly skyscrapers. Assuming those openings are even windows...

Pipes are another common element in his work. What are these structures for? Do they produce the meat? Do they dispose of it? The pipes emit vapor. Water vapor? Meat fumes? They emerge from and then plunge back into the land in an almost organic way, like they are growths rather than manmade.

His black and white work offers more clues as to the "rules" of this realm. As before, wherever a pipe mounts to the meat of a living creature it does so through a rectangular bracket. But here we also see palm trees, or something like them, where the fronds are instead mouse tails.

Sometimes there is no single discreet object that is the focus of the painting. Instead it becomes the landscape itself or just a flowing contiguous material made out of the same cartoon elements as everything else in his work. The pipes, the meat, the shoes. Ribs and spongy internal tissues are revealed anywhere there's an opening cut in the meat, evoking the hanging cow remains in a slaughterhouse.

The various possible fittings for the pipes seen here offer more and more clues to the logic of his machinery. An entire island overtaken by it, like vines or moss, mouse tails present as well. Though it's not in color I would speculate based on his color paintings that the island itself is made of meat.

What I love most are the various subtle inter-referential clues. For example the city featured in one painting it seen in the distant background of another. The cartoon shoes in many of his paintings are revealed in another to be grown on a bush, something like grapes which shrivel into raisins in the sun.

So were they ever shoes? Are they used as shoes, or have we been led to misinterpret those jointed stalks they mount to as legs, just as we were led to misinterpret the shriveled fruits as shoes? How much of this world is what it appears to be and how much only superficially resembles things from our own reality?

Mr. Toyonaga is not just a talented painter, but a talented sculptor as well. His ceramic works have their own feel which is clearly related, but not identical to, the subject matter of his paintings. Resembling alien fruit in many cases, one or two bear his signature pipes and knobs but for the most part they have their own distinct alien feel.

What are these strange objects? What dimension could they be from? If we saw them in their natural surroundings, would that suddenly make sense of it? Are the mechanical elements truly artificial or just natural outgrowths that we misinterpret as machinery because they superficially resemble something we're familiar with?

Questions there may well be no answer to. Or if there are answers, they are known only to Mr. Toyonaga. His work left a lasting impression on me for many of the same reasons Zdzisław Beksiński's did. He depicts a world where almost nothing is recognizable, and what little is has been arranged in ways contrary to their original meaning. Yet, there are rules. The more we see of this world the more we learn about how it works, as it has the internal consistency we subconsciously associate with reality.

His original showing was titled "Awakening". It certainly awakened me! If ever Mr. Toyonaga's work is shown in your city, you might do yourself a favor and go check it out. You're in for something truly weird and special. A brief glimpse of impossible realities, patchwork cartoon meat creatures and more dredged up from the dark corners of his mind.