“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."
Yu Nishimura’s across the place is an outstanding example of the melancholic and surreal scenes that have taken center stage in the rising Japanese painter’s practice. Executed at a commanding scale, the present work foregrounds the artist’s characteristic dreamlike compositions and hazy painterly approach, radiating with a delicate sense of sent.mes ntality and intimacy found in everyday life. Taking inspiration from broad influences including flat manga aesthetics and post-war Japanese street photography, Nishimura paints quotidian moments with care and contemplation that captivate the viewer. His portraits, suffused with a sense of reminiscence, reach into a layer of reality that lies beyond straightforward interpretation: “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) across the place locates poetry and lyricism in the act of remembrance, even in the most mundane of scenes, inviting the viewer into its dreamy, interstitial space.
Born in 1982 in Kanagawa, Japan, Nishimura has often explained that his practice interrogates the myriad manifestations of the history of portraiture, taking a step beyond mere figuration to harness a certain essence of his subjects. As if to gather remnants of memory for reflection, Nishimura’s paintings channel a particular emotional enchantment that captures the essence of the quotidian and the personal. Drawn from fragments of his lived experiences, the artist’s oeuvre is brimming with a sense of foreboding nostalgia, his protagonists tracing through the haze of everyday life in wispy and reserved expressions. Closely cropped to fill the entire height of across the place is a man’s face, staring through the picture plane directly at the viewer with a contemplative gaze. Portrayed atop his countenance is another man, clad in a crisp white collared shirt and navy jeans, sitting cross-legged with a subtle and enigmatic smirk. Nishimura’s characteristic superimposition—inspired by double-exposure photography—is spotlighted in the present work as three more figures occupy the canvas: two figures suggested in swift and repeated brushstrokes of black and a head of green complexion blending into the painting’s smoky grey background. Through the superimposition of five anonymous subjects, some more lucid and immediate than others, across the place blurs into an atemporal stasis; as the title suggests, it stitches together unbridgeable moments in t.mes and space into a certain landscape of memory. Superimposed fragments combine to appear as if the entire canvas is in motion, collapsing t.mes and perspective, capturing different moments of t.mes on the same canvas.
“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.”
Nishimura tinkers with linear perspective and flattens the picture plane, borrowing from artistic forebears of ukiyo-e and manga aesthetics, to deftly depict a quotidian moment with an evocative sense of intimacy. Despite working with traditional techniques in oil painting, the artist cites Japanese street photography as his predominant inspiration: “Although I could learn enough about technique from painters, as an artist, I was trying to find the answer to the fundamental question of what and how to paint it in a few photographers. I felt a sense of nostalgia and déjà vu, even though the photographs were taken long before I was born. I wanted to capture this scene in a painting. However, unlike photography, the subject itself always lies in a state of change in the accumulation of t.mes in the act of painting. I have come to believe that it is natural to make paintings of this change in the subject, and my own change with the subject.” (the artist quoted in: Daphné Mookherjee, “Yu Nishimura,” aleï journal, Iss. 8, July 2021, p. 12) Drawing from the aesthetics of the Provoke era, and particularly their emphasis on Are-Bure-Boke (rough, blurred, and out-of-focus), Nishimura embraces the dreamlike effect of superimposing, overlapping, blurring, and misaligning brushstrokes to capture fleeting moments of modern life. What results is a canvas that recalls filmic scenes retrieved from recollects ion, inviting the viewer to parse through the painting’s elusive stories and awaken their own secret.mes mories.
