Signed and numbered on the front

Created for and exhibited at Hajime Sorayama's second solo exhibition with Almine Rech in Paris, from June 9 to July 29, 2023.

​In the word creature, there is create. Hajime Sorayama creates creatures, like a mischievous Pygmalion, chiseling muscles that shimmer under the skin, shaping pearlescent lips and necks, from which he extracts, with a touch of sensuality, his steel Galateas. For Hajime Sorayama's recent paintings take on a narrative dimension, taking inspiration from a collective memory haunted by androids and pin-ups, carnal and chrome-like sylphs. Once again, we see the obsessive theme of the female body, depicted like a leitmotiv that lends the work its cohesion through continuity.

​Born in 1947 in Japan, an independent illustrator from 1972, the artist soon elaborated a singular style, with cyber-erotic tones, which brought him worldwide fame in the 1980s. "I draw metals to depict a woman's softness [1]." This is what his painting voluptuously manipulates, this discordance between steel and skin, the sharp and the smooth, tekhne and erotica, calling on the viewer's culture and memory to bear witness as if against the grain. Hence, Marilyn with her flying skirt is a hackneyed image, but here, this retro-futuristic glamor, outside of post-humanist aesthetics, invites us to a parasensory gentleness, from an unknown time and place.