Altamira - Horse

The horse is the Altamira-series subject closest to the actual iconography of the Cantabrian cave, where horses appear among the bison, deer, and hand stencils of the Paleolithic ceiling. Takeda's mokuhanga rendering engages with the silhouette and arrested gesture typical of cave painting — a profile view, weight-bearing legs, the characteristic curve from withers to rump. The woodblock medium offers a productive analog to wall painting: both depend on a textured ground (carved cherry block, pigmented stone) and on subtractive mark-making to hold an image. Takeda's sculptural training at Tama Art University informs his sense of the print as an object with surface and weight rather than a transparent image. Within his wider practice — which moves between cartoon, illustration, and printed editions — the Altamira horse functions both as a study in the longest-running animal subject in art history and as an exercise in reducing a familiar form to its graphic essentials.