Self-renewal

In exploring the emotional side of illustrations for children, Koharutie transgresses the codes of a genre to create a new one: the Emo-Pop Art, or, the art of giving shape to our anxieties through images normally used to express other emotions. In combining a fecund naiveté with fierce introspection, these pieces together create a reflection of the paradoxes of our generation; namely, if innocence is nothing but a dream, then perhaps suffering is the harbinger of our redemption?

Exposing his fragility to the world by opening the vessel of his anger, Koharutie (a name meaning “child of Spring”) is more than a simply talented watercolor painter— he's a sincere and sensitive artist searching to turn his childhood wounds into the provenance of his renaissance. In fact, “Self-Renewal” is the title of one of his pieces.

But the budding of this new life (beyond, of course, the first life that he was given) in a way resembles a terrible affliction that compels the one who submits to it to turn against himself— to become the enemy of his past illusions. Taking their head in their hands, who will have the strength to rise above? With an eye towards the void and half-gnawed knees, Koharutie illustrates the narrow hope of our broken dreams, and the anxious biding of our tearful romances. His work poses this question: What if willful blindness is the sacred code of our condition, the self-sacrifice, the symbol of our engagement with the real world?

"The fleetest beast to carry you to perfection is suffering," says Meister Eckhart, as born from suffering are the fruits of virtue and charity. Koharutie knows this: on the scorched earth of our shortfalls, at the exact moment when regret turns into repentance—here rise fields of flowers in honor of a new Aphrodite; an Aphrodite with a tattooed forehead who carries in her hands the new rose of her love, reinvented.

Frédéric-Charles Baitinger