Tam Ochiai

"Tam Ochiai Remember ashtrays? Now banished from nearly all indoor spaces in the city, they’ve been rescued by the Japanese artist from secondhand shops and incorporated into surprisingly graceful tabletop abstractions. In most of these quiet compositions, one or two sit on a painted base. “CD (Carrie Fisher, Debbie Reynolds)” features kindred squares of metal-trimmed marble—one big, one small—with matching cigarette rests, like modernist memorials on an avocado-hued ground. The artist strikes a very different tone with a blue-plastic promotional giveaway from the New York State lottery: the lone ashtray sits in the corner of a wooden rectangle decorated with expressive squiggles. Those who haven’t yet given up the vice are invited to smoke in the gallery, and the sight is practically shocking."

—Team; Through April 29. Published in the print edition of the May 1, 2017, issue

Like his peers Takashi Murakami and Hiroshi Sugito, Japanese artist Tam Ochiai is influenced by pop culture, but his work seems more obsessed with childhood than theirs. At the same time, he is very much a painter, someone who is clearly comfortable with traditional art materials (pencil, paint, brushes).

Ochiai’s third show at Team was titled "August" and featured large works on stretched canvas, most of which depict adolescent figures painted in a faux naif style. Their heads are positioned in the picture's upper center, and all have a dusting of freckles drifting down a vaguely feline nose. Evoking both Dubuffet and kindergarten drawings, Ochiai tends to sketch the arms and heads in with pencil and then "dresses" the hair and clothing with bleeding, transparent colors. All of the images are on white grounds, with the gesso petering out as it reaches the edges of the canvas.

Crytic (like all the works, dated 2002) is a roughly 5½-by-4½-foot portrait that utilizes acrylic, pencil and colored pencil. The figure's arms, scrawled in pencil, steady an upright guitar. A deep-turquoise shirt is splashed with limp-wristed authority, and a slash of orange-ocher depicts a scarf at the neck. Inexplicably, the sketched-in hair reveals a glimpse of a squirrel on the top

In addition to the portrait paintings, Ochiai rolled a few multicolored Play-Doh balls onto the floor drains and gently penciled tiny animal imagery onto areas of the gallery walls. There were a few small drawings (about 8 by 10 inches) in hand-painted frames and a Lambda print of a cat in an orange frame. Drawn on the wall near the floor below the cat portrait was a pair of pointy boots, suggesting, at least to this viewer, a mod fairy tale called "Puss in Beatle Boots." Near the gallery entrance was an uncredited video (it was not on the checklist) that showed people laughing in a wide selection of movie clips. The poor technical quality of the video distorted the images, hinting at the source of the bleeding color in Ochiai's paintings. At once accomplished and insouciant, his work makes many other painters look like they are just trying too hard.

—Joe Fyfe