IchiBA DAisuke (born 1963) is a Japanese visual artist who lives and works in Tokyo. His paintings are a striking fusion of violence and beauty, depicting a fragile yet unsettling world infused with Japanese phantasms and grotesque moral contradictions. Within his work, themes of youth and sexuality intertwine with corruption and death, creating an eerie contrast that challenges conventional notions of aesthetics and morality.
Ichiba's artistic journey took shape in the 1980s, when he began painting with serious intent. In 1990, he self-published his first book, 37-Year-Old Bastard, marking the beginning of a prolific career in which he has continued to release a new book each year. His unique artistic vision soon garnered the attention of renowned manga artist Takashi Nemoto, as well as Pakito Bolino from Le Dernier Cri, a Marseille-based outsider art gallery known for its raw and subversive aesthetic.
Ichiba’s philosophy as an artist is deeply rooted in the coexistence of tenderness and brutality, a perspective that he articulates with unflinching clarity: "People embody both tenderness and violence simultaneously. If you were to peel back the face of a beautiful woman, you would find it teeming with entrails. To create works that only depict beauty feels artificial to me. I choose to paint both, as they are inseparable. The resulting expression is one of natural chaos. Through my art, I manifest chaos, anarchy, fear, the grotesque, the absurd, and the irrational—yet, within this disorder, I find harmony. This is my art. Simply put, I paint humanity, or rather, the spirit of humanity."
Ichiba’s work remains a bold exploration of the human condition, confronting the viewer with raw, visceral imagery that defies conventional artistic boundaries. His paintings serve as both a mirror and a distortion of reality, drawing us into a world where the beautiful and the macabre are inextricably linked.
