Ryo Takemasa

Ryo Takemasa likes the advertisements that taught children how to want things in the 1950s and 60s: bright, slightly wrong, too friendly by half. Born in 1981, he studied at Musashino Art University in Kodaira and went freelance in 2010. His people stroll through streets that refuse ordinary perspective, as if the buildings had been remembered on the walk home rather than measured by a surveyor with a straight edge and a clean conscience.

The work is editorial before it is anything else: books, magazines, products, advertising. Covers for Squet, Quarterly Musashino, and NON made the manner familiar inside Japan. He is a member of the Tokyo Illustrators Society and has received three Merits and an Honorable Mention in 3×3’s annual Professional Show, which is a tidy way of saying other illustrators kept circling back to the same crooked street and the same cheerful walker.

You do not need the certificates to enter. Stand in one of those streets for a moment. The cheerful figure is not lost, and the city is not collapsing. It is simply declining to behave. That small, almost polite disobedience is the invitation, and it is why the pictures feel nostalgic without asking you to mourn anything in particular, or to pretend you remember a decade you never lived.

The mid-century colors are a tool, not a costume party. Familiar shapes and textures do the greeting; the bent buildings do the holding. Once you have accepted the cheerful walker as a guide, the street can misbehave as much as it likes. That is the difference between a pastiche and a place you want to stay. Takemasa builds the second kind, then lets you find your own way home through a city that never quite agrees to be mapped, and never quite asks you to apologize for lingering on the corner.