“There are no defined themes of gender, race, or politics, but the work decants a poetry and passion for the world that ultimately becomes a political act of resistance, a rereading of the universe around us, recounting the aura of everyday life by placing it in an emotional and dreamlike pictorial space."
Closely cropped to the subject’s face, Yu Nishimura’s Pause from 2018 captures the dreamlike, interstitial spaces that have figured prominently into the practice of the up-and-coming Japanese painter in recent years, an oeuvre that captures quotidian moments rich with emotional enchantment. Combining tropes of ancient Japanese scroll painting, a fascination with manga and anime, and an acute interest in postwar Japanese street photography, Nishimura depicts intimate scenes of daily life and the figures within it through impulses that are both stylistically and temporally blurry. Executed in Nishimura’s characteristically hazy painterly approach, Pause is immediately full of movement yet exudes stillness, the anonymous figure standing frozen in t.mes while the small world that Nishimura has created closes in around her. Situated within an emerging group of Japanese painters who depict the whimsy and intrigue found in the everyday, Nishimura’s paintings capture the poetry in even the most mundane of scenes.
Born in Kanagawa, Japan, Nishimura has oft remarked that his practice focuses on the many manifestations of the notion of portraiture, drawing well beyond merely human figuration to capture the essence of his subjects, be they people, dogs, cats, or even the landscapes they find themselves in. Pause, however, resolutely a portrait of an anonymous subject, suggests a kind of landscape of the mind. As skin, hair, and lips blur together in an atemporal stasis, Pause, as its title suggests, seems to capture the miraculous split second of a forming thought, of a sentence to be uttered. Nishimura’s superimposed fragments combine to appear as if the entire canvas is in motion, collapsing t.mes and perspective and capturing different moments in t.mes on the same canvas.
Drawn from fragments and memories of his lived experiences, Nishimura’s paintings are suffused with a sense of foreboding nostalgia, his figures walking amongst the haze of everyday life. Nishimura’s subjects, like the protagonist of Pause, nearly always hold a reserved expression, wispily drawn in a manner that immediately recalls the sharp facial lines and reduced details of anime. As Nishimura has remarked, “I want to capture the actuality of people and objects by depicting their outer forms by rendering it like silhouettes” (Yu Nishimura, “Around October,” Kayokoyuki, October 24 ‒ November 29, 2020). In his retooling of linear perspective and flattening of the picture plane much in the manner of his forebears of Ukiyo-e, Nishimura’s figure becomes one with the title, with the air around her. Nishimura’s interest in foregrounding Japanese identity is evident in his work, particularly in his interest in the street photographers Daidō Moriyama, Takuma Nakahira, and their contemporaries in the Provoke era, and particularly their emphasis on Are-Bure-Boke (rough, blurred, and out-of-focus). Nishimura’s characteristic blurring immediately evokes these photographer’s radical approach to documentary photography, capturing fleeting moments of modern life.
“In the end, my image is nothing but a motivation to do something on the picture plane. It is an entrance; I cannot move forward unless a dog is more than a dog, or a cat is more than a cat. Even if the shapes with undifferentiated elements, which are made along a meandering path, once again become dogs and cats, they appear as dogs and cats who have passed through the scenery. The distance between the subjects and landscapes is removed, creating a single way of viewing the painting.”
Enigmatic, restrained, yet full of life, Nishimura’s Pause captures a snapshot portrait of his subject in a mere millisecond, frozen permanently in paint. Overlapping t.mes and perspective through delicately layered painterly elements and a blurred atmosphere, Nishimura collapses the two by creating a painting that seems to exist in a dreamlike space, outside of the bounds of ordinary t.mes . Executed at commanding scale, Pause highlights Nishimura’s finesse at handling both the smallest and largest formats of painting. Capturing the kind of fleeting moment that Nishimura has become so adept at painting, Pause draws upon a rich vocabulary of art history and popular culture to comment on the allure found in the everyday.
