こうした記憶の揺らぎを経て、大庭は、知人と自身がそれぞれ撮影した二枚のスナップショットをもとに、イメージの断片を抽出・分解し、描線や立体的なパーツとして画面上に再構成していきます。これは記憶の断片化と再構築のメカニズムを視覚的に表現するものであり、部分的に用いられた金属顔料や、画面に施された微細な凹凸が、鑑賞者の視点の移動によって光の反射や陰影の変化を生み出します。断続的で抽象的な描線は、過去の経験の痕跡をとどめながら、一つの出来事に内在する多様な解釈の可能性を静かに喚起します。

　近年の作品において大庭が探究するのは、実際には体験していない出来事を、あたかも自分が体験したかのように想起してしまう「過誤記憶」や、他者の記憶がいつしか自分自身のものと重なってしまう「記憶の流用」といった認知現象です。彼は、知人の何気ないスナップ写真や、その時代特有の空気をまとったエピソードを、対話の中で丹念に掬い上げます。こうして集められた記憶の断片は、大庭の手によって練り上げられ、フィクショナルな風景として画面上に再構築されます。幾重にも圧縮された他者との記憶は、緻密で意図的な画面構成の中で解凍され、単なる過去の再現や抽象化を超えて、絵画として確かな存在感を帯びて現前します。

Ohba is interested in both our brain’s ability to perceive things accurately and the ambiguity and uncertainty that inevitably coexist with that capacity. In his work, he explores how our perception wavers and where we draw the boundaries of what we call reality. In recent years, he has focused in particular on personal episodes that determine one’s sense of self—episodic memories—and on the fluidity of those memories as they are unconsciously reshaped by small stimuli in everyday life.

The starting point of his work is photography as a supposedly objective record—especially snapshots of everyday scenes that anyone might have seen. Ohba places side by side an ordinary landscape photograph provided by an acquaintance and a similar photograph he has taken himself, and talks with the person about the episodes associated with each image. Drawing on experimental procedures developed in cognitive psychology, this act is an intentional reconstruction of psychological situations in which errors and confusions of memory are likely to occur, and it reflects his interest in the way memories are quietly rewritten over time. Through such conversations, Ohba touches on layers of memory that are changing form unconsciously and attempts to scoop up their traces into his work. The process of carefully observing the faint discrepancies that emerge between each person’s mental image becomes a practice that directly engages with memory as a cognitive phenomenon and quietly probes the processes of its formation.

Through these subtle instabilities of memory, Ohba takes the two snapshots—one taken by an acquaintance and one by himself—as source material, extracting and breaking down fragments of imagery and recomposing them on the picture plane as linear marks and three-dimensional elements. This visualizes the mechanisms by which memory is fragmented and reconstructed. Metallic pigments applied in certain areas and the fine irregularities worked into the surface create shifting reflections and shadows as the viewer moves. The intermittent, abstract lines retain traces of past experiences while gently evoking the multiple interpretive possibilities inherent in a single event.

In his recent works, Ohba has been exploring cognitive phenomena such as “false memories,” in which a person recalls events they have never actually experienced as if they were their own, and the “appropriation” of memory, in which someone else’s recollection gradually becomes indistinguishable from one’s own. He carefully draws out casual snapshots from acquaintances and the anecdotes that carry the atmosphere of a particular time through conversation. The fragments of memory thus collected are kneaded together in his hands and reconstructed on the surface as fictional landscapes. These memories shared with others, compressed into multiple layers, are unpacked within a meticulously controlled composition, and come to the fore with a tangible presence as paintings—beyond mere reproduction or abstraction of the past.