Slip House is pleased to present Paintings of Incomplete Remains, a solo exhibition of new works by Keisuke Tada, continuing his exploration of the material and perceptual boundaries of painting in a post-digital era. This marks Tada’s debut solo presentation in New York and will be on view from November 20, 2025, to January 11, 2026.

Tada’s works inhabit an ambiguous space between painting, sculpture, and artifact. Their layered, fractured surfaces suggest both archaeological remnants and digital disruption—a visual language that reflects the tension between endurance and impermanence. Through a process that fuses digital manipulation with painterly reconstruction, Tada examines how an image persists—whether in physical substance, memory, or virtual data.

Since initiating the series in 2016, Tada has approached painting as a terrain where history and simulation intersect. His practice draws on the legacy of 19th-century landscape traditions—particularly the Barbizon and Hudson River Schools—not only for their imagery but also for their process of sketching outdoors and later transforming those studies in the studio into composite, idealized landscapes. Tada extends this approach into the post-digital realm, collaborating with a computer graphics artist to design virtual fields and environments that serve as the basis for his paintings. Using these digitally constructed images as reference, he translates simulated scenes into painterly form, echoing the Barbizon artists’ engagement with nature but through the lens of the 21st century. The process mirrors visual effects (VFX) workflows, where fragments are composited into coherent virtual worlds. Like VFX, Tada’s practice constructs believable landscapes from imagination, producing worlds that feel both fabricated and familiar.

These invented scenes become the foundation for his paintings, where the virtual is rendered materially. Translating his imagined terrains into pigment and texture, Tada creates surfaces that oscillate between image and object—depictions of places that appear ancient, weathered, and partly broken, yet exist only within his imagination. What begins as drawing and digital composition ends as material evidence—an irony that these fictional spaces endure in paint, documented as if they were relics of a world that never existed.

“What does it mean for a painting to be complete? Questions about the relationship between image and substance are linked to my interest in imperfection,” Tada has explained. This philosophy underpins the exhibition, where each painting exists in a state of tension between stability and flux. The works evoke the temporal ambiguity of relics and the spatial displacement of digital imagery, oscillating between presence and absence, substance and illusion.

In collaboration with Holbein, the Japanese paint manufacturer, Tada employs pigments and binders in unconventional ways, extending them beyond their traditional uses. Techniques drawn from model-making, diorama construction, and cinematic prop fabrication transform industrial materials into tactile fields. The resulting surfaces are dense, fissured, and luminous—appearing to have weathered centuries even as their fractured glow recalls the pixelated decay of a digital screen.

By invoking both geological and technological metaphors, Tada positions his work within ongoing discussions of materiality and perception in the post-digital condition. His “incomplete remains” articulate the instability of the image in a world where visual culture is endlessly reproduced, circulated, and transformed. With Paintings of Incomplete Remains, Tada extends the language of realism into new territory, merging historical sensibility with contemporary mediation. His paintings embody the condition of looking in the present—where images exist across time and space, fragile yet persistent, suspended between the tangible and the virtual. They ask how we continue to see, and what remains, when the boundaries between the real and the rendered collapse into one another.

Keisuke Tada (B. 1986; Nagoya, Japan) lives and works in Aichi, Japan. He received both his BFA and MFA in Oil Painting from Aichi University of the Arts in 2010 and 2012, respectively. Recent solo exhibitions include at MAKI Gallery, Tokyo (2025 & 2023), Gallery Common, Tokyo (2023), MAHO KUBOTA GALLERY, Tokyo (2020), and rin art association, Gunma (2020). He Has adddirtional arrrticipated in group exhibitions across the globe, including at Winter Street Gallery, Paris; Powerlong Museum, Shanghai; The Ueno Royal Museum, Tokyo; and Nagoya City Art Museum, Aichi.