Daisuke Ichiba (born 1963, lives and works in Tokyo) is a Japanese visual artist. Daisuke Ichiba's images are violent and beautiful. His paintings describe a delicate world haunted by Japanese phantasms and grotesqueries of moral contradictions; a world where youth and sex mingle with corruption and death. Daisuke Ichiba started painting seriously in the eighties and in 1990 self-published his first book entitled 37 Year Old Bastard. Since then, he has continued to release a book a year, and was noticed by the great manga artist Takashi Nemoto, as well as Pakito, from the outsider art gallery, Le Dernier Cri based in Marseille, France. "Humans simultaneously combine tenderness and violence. If you peel back the face of a beautiful woman you see it is clogged with viscera. Choosing to create work that is only beautiful feels artificial. Thus I paint both. You cannot sever the two. The expression that results is a natural chaos. In my work I project chaos, anarchy, anxiety, the grotesque, the absurd, and the irrational. By doing so I attain harmony. This is my art. Put simply, I paint humanity (the spirit)." – Daisuke Ichiba
