Jelly fish 2003

Takashi Murakami made this Jelly Fish, we don’t have a date for it, but it’s likely a relatively recent work, made with acrylic on canvas. Look at the evenness of the color. Nothing is overworked, everything is precise. This guy is not fucking around! The surface is incredibly flat, with none of the texture that might come from brushstrokes or any sense of the artist’s hand, which, paradoxically, seems incredibly deliberate. The combination of total control and goofy psychedelia is jarring, but kind of magnetic. I am drawn to the way the blue in the ‘jelly fish’s’ left eye is echoed in the teeth in its enormous grin. In some ways, Murakami reminds me of Elizabeth Murray, in that both manage to find a place where the cartoon meets the cosmic. They find a way to be extremely weird and extremely pleasurable at the same time.