The works of Dante Horoiwa evoke what the semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce conceptualized as the “admirable”: a work that awakens a mode of overwhelming aesthetic apprehension. It is an experience that articulates both emotional and intellectual perception, but also a recognition — or reconnection — with an unknown world we somehow sense we once inhabited in another space and time.
This other universe that Dante Horoiwa creates dialogues with his own search for identity: as a human being, as an artist, and as a descendant of an ancestral lineage. The artist undertook a journey to Japan in search of his origins and found, as an answer, the Ainu — the indigenous people who inhabit(ed) the northern and northeastern regions of Japan, mainly Hokkaidō and Tōhoku.

Beyond exhibitions in Brazil, Dante has a significant international trajectory: Sydney and Melbourne, in Australia; Monterrey, in Mexico; New York and San Jose, in the United States. He has created monumental murals in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and in Minsk, Belarus.

Intuition governs his creative process: guided by visions and dreams, he creates enigmatic universes that reflect his journey of self-discovery and spirituality. This recent closeness to Japan — both through travel and through his decision to establish residence in the country — represents a moment of transformation: new symbols and references will be incorporated into his visual language, promising the creation of works that are even more “admirable.”

Michiko Okano