Yohta Matsuoka began his art career as an artist in 2004 through live painting, been getting in touch with the street culture scene of Japan. Applying abstract expression composed of painting patterns to wall paintings, he has left large-scale mural paintings in various places in Japan and overseas with his dynamic and highly flexible paintings as JON JON GREEN. It has been created artworks that would be called “still life paintings” since 2021, in which he arranges objects with a fundamental sense on monochrome canvases.
He considers whether objects can become something different from their original form by cleverly putting motifs. The human brain is programmed to see a figure consisting of three dots as a human face, a phenomenon called the simulacra. Depending on the arrangement of the combined objects, an apple is replaced by a nose or eyes, and a banana is seen as a smiling mouth. In this case, the apples and bananas lose their original food qualities and become objects that signify something else. He said “if you look up at an object, you can see the details of the object, and if you look down, you can see the circumstances surrounding the object. By examining an object or matter from different perspectives, we can deepen our understanding of it and develop various imaginations. I believe that the world expands when the ordinary things we see as usual become completely new, and we discover and realize new things.”