Daisuke Yokota
"Untitled Color Works"

Daisuke Yokota’s work questions the relationship between memory, images and sensations. His practice consists of constantly revisiting his own personal photographic archive by adding layers of accidents, to metaphorically signify the layering of states of consciousness and memories. Often referring to the principles of echo and reverberation, Yokota also makes connections between the visual and musical fields. One could say that he captures "noise" in the broadest sense of the word.

The Untitled Color Works presented at approche gathers selected works from several artist publications and series produced between 2015 and 2022 (Color Photographs, SCUM, and Sediment). These abstract color works are photographs made without a camera or light source. The images are pure chemical reactions, created after an unorthodox photographic process in a darkroom. Yokota, boiling the large format negatives causes the release of the sensitive emulsion. He then repeatedly examines the results of his experiments, finally creating very high-resolution scans. They seem more the work of a painter than a photographer, but it is in this in-between space that this innovative approach finds its source. An abstract image is perceived but also a record of the creation of that image.

Yokota (born 1983) lives and works in Tokyo. He has won numerous awards, such as the 45th Kimura Ihei Award (2019), Foam Paul Huf Award (2016) and the Photo London John Kobal Residency Award (2015). His work has been exhibited internationally and is included in numerous collections, including Tate Modern, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Museum of Modern Art in Paris. He is the author of more than 100 artists’ publications.