Masaya Chiba’s witty figurative paintings blur the lines between sculpture, landscape, still life and portraiture. His works typically begin life in his studio as assemblages of both readymade and handmade objects, which are then faithfully reproduced on canvas using a finely developed painterly technique. Chiba complicates this transposition between sculpture and painting with visual jokes, toying with the sizes and shapes of his canvases or their modes of presentation and often contriving the paintings into installations that gleefully disregard conventions of display.

Since 2023, Chiba has been prolifically developing ‘vegetable paintings’ – still-life depictions of abstract structures comprising crossed beams tipped with coloured balls, displayed alongside actual fruit, vegetables and other objects traditionally depicted in still-life painting. The artist extends this methodology with his ‘Theatre in the world of plaid’ series 2024, in which the paintings and their accompanying fresh produce are arranged across patterned sheets of fabric. The compositions are completed with pencil-on-paper sketches, homemade photo wheels and arrays of QR codes linking to ‘secret’ videos.

While displaying a strong absurdist sensibility, Chiba’s works are also committed to the interpretative and sensory possibilities of painting – suspended between convention and innovation.