The Onyrical Digital Worlds
The history of art is characterized by the continual emergence of new techniques and styles that we aren’t always immediately able to value and grasp in all its possibilities of expression. It is probable that the same is happening with digital art, a media that many judge to be bereft of originality and only involves a superficial search for ‘effect’. On the surface, it seems almost entirely done by the computer alone, without the engagement of human creativity. In particular, in Italy, it is still difficult to understand that the PC is only an instrument, as brushes are to colours, and that the creative worker does not necessarily have to be dirty from oil colours and turpentine in order to be considered an ‘artist’.
Italian digital artists are still slowly creating their own niche with special exhibitions and competitions in order to reach the public and gain recognition. Through this activity they are diminishing the distrust and skepticism many people have toward the media and educating them to the creative potential of digital technology.
To open a space in this world still under exploration, I want talk about an interesting and evocative artist: Japi Honoo. She’s in the fact an Italian artist, but linked to Japanese culture by an inexplicable affinity. Self-taught, she was fond of drawing since her childhood, and began her artistic journey through a progressive empirical knowledge of digital art and the application of photo manipulation. Japi uses such programs as Photoshop and Illustrator to reinterpret and express obsessions and fantasies that had also been the focus of such great surrealist artists as Max Ernst and Salvador Dali. The central theme of her work is the female body; manipulated, distorted and extended until reaching the Whole. The delicate and almost impalpable colours in her pictures evoke the gentle and dreamy atmosphere of Japanese aesthetics and artistic tradition.
Japi Honoo describes her imagery as stories of her “state of mind”. Her stories express “feeling out of time and belong to every age.” For Japi, digital techniques can assume the same function as the paint brush, enabling her to create new worlds and possibilities for the interpretation of femininity. Subject to reinterpretation are the central and eternal themes of the feminine dimension: sexuality, vanity, body degeneration, pregnancy and maternity. To do this, she utilizes the bodies of models who reflect the current concept of beauty, and then distorts them, creating and alienation in the viewer that raises questions and concerns regarding all the aforementioned feminine themes. Japi says that this artistic choice is due to her indifference to “perfection” and instead prefers the “single being “. She wants to “give an authentic life to those bodies, so they can tell personal and universal stories”. Visionary artists may indulge in various technical and creative strategies. They can follow the knowledge and path of the Old Masters’ techniques, like the mixed technique of egg tempera and oils as employed by Ernst Fuchs, or they can explore new media, as is happening with artists like Peter Gric or Japi Honoo. Whatever route they choose the destination is always the same: to create worlds full of artistic sensitivity and ecstasy in which the viewer is invited to become immersed.
