Devan Shimoyama

Region: MFA Annual

The figures in my work find themselves echoed throughout the paintings, attempting to connect, but failing to join and fulfill their sensual desires. Tender moments of touch are often displayed and repeated within these dreamscapes of skewed spatial perspectives and oddly vacant domestic rooms. With the tactility of thickly poured and splattered paint and the effervescence of luminously sprayed stencils, silhouettes of figures burst with divine ecstasy, often sensually interacting with other figures from a different realm. The emphasis on the figures’ faces and genitals, rendered using traditional portrait drawing techniques, evokes a personal void: the absence of a distant lover’s warmth or even the intimacy of self-searching touch. The figures are stripped, dauntless, and brazenly inviting. They are wholly magical and universally human.