I came across a book of Yokoyama’s paintings at the Royal/T Cafe in Culver City, which is a highly buzzed-about new restaurant that pays homage to the “maid cafe” otaku culture in Japan. The cafe inhabits a humongous space filled out by fun, creatively curated glass-box art displays, as well as a gift shop filled with cool but overpriced (they were selling Yokoyama’s book, Painting for more than $100 when its American retailer prices it at $65) products to help you live your Japanese-loving lifestyle to the fullest.

I was immediately draw in to Yokoyama’s work by the delicious color palette he uses in his paintings, and my fascination deepened upon investigating his mangas. There’s something beautiful in the way Yokoyama exploits the cognitive tricks of comic book art, using suspense and careful framing to examine the details of everyday life, and manipulating our assumptions by carefully providing us with contradictory or intentionally illogical clues about what exactly we’re seeing. I came across an excellent analysis of Yokoyama’s manga work from Chris Lanier on the blog The High Hat. Lanier examines, among other things, Yokoyama’s use of fighting as a tool for deconstructing everyday environments, mundane objects like potted plants and kitchenware, and the conventions of superhero comics. Lanier describes a Yokoyama fight sequence set in a library, where books become weapons:

If the spine is sliced away, the cover and individual pages will detach and scatter. If a book is cut at the midpoint of the cover, from top to bottom, while still in its dust jacket, the half of the jacket without the spine will spill a sheaf of disconnected pages. If a corner of a book is cut away at the spine at a 45-degree angle, when the book opens, every page spread will have a triangle cut out of the middle. The variety becomes methodical, almost scientific — these are, in the most literal sense, cutaway diagrams. In fact, many of the books that come apart in “Livres” are books of diagrams: blueprints of floor plans, charts of evolutionary progress, maps of the globe webbed with latitude and longitude lines, geometric figures of mathematical formulae.

[…] The comic panels themselves, many of them set at skewed or slashing angles, become another kind of dissection, framing the scattered pages of the exploded books. The fighting figures and the floating illustrations in the books have the same visual weight, so the pages of the books act as panels within panels, space interpenetrating space (in fact, in one panel, a “villain” is about to get smacked with an open comic book, and the pages spread before him depict another fight). The air becomes a blizzard of information — and a fracturing and folding of space along kaleidoscopic fault lines.

Yokoyama’s paintings deal with similar subject matter and visual themes, but, naturally, find themselves divorced even further from the idea of narrative. Here, Yokoyama becomes even freer to drift into abstraction, without relinquishing the eerie uncanniness of his manga work. But best of all, the colors! They’re so reminiscent of childhood and candy and ice cream, but the content of his images never veers towards such tweeness. His paintings aren’t just colorful to make you pay attention, like nu-rave— Yokoyama really cares about the colors he chooses, and you can almost feel him enjoying the subtle mood each choice creates.