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Kiyoshi NAKAGAMI - Peintures 2018 - 2021
Featured works
Press release
Galerie Richard, Paris presents eleven paintings by Kiyoshi Nakagami on his personal exhibition entitled «Paintings 2018 -2021» from 8 to 30 October 2021. Galerie Richard has represented the artist since 2003. Kiyoshi Nakagami is one of the most respected artists in Japan. His 2018 paintings with deep contrasts and dark areas through the contribution of Indian ink juxtapose with new recent works that mark a return to color and greater overall brightness.
“As a painter, there is nothing more difficult than to represent light in painting. Those who arrive there are the greatest painters, the greatest artists”. Kiyoshi Nakagami
He was not impressed by his colleagues except for James Turrell, whom he assisted during his installations in Japan. The public is invited to contemplate the disposition and the degradation of the density of light in the painting. This density varies from one work to another and its dispersion in the dark space. The light spreads through a series of sumptuous perfect gradations. Before reaching the focal point of light, it must pass through an undetermined vaporous material. The artist’s ability to reproduce the beauty of the diffusion of light in a painting has no equivalent.
His first exhibition in New York was the subject of a text by the great art historian Donald Kuspit published in Artforum in December 2012: «Consequently Nakagami «painted» by depositing his acrylic layer on the canvas, moving it, and allowing gravity to move the pigment it enriched with mica. The result is works filled with undulations that evoke cascades of light free of traces of brushes. This lack of gestuality also suggests the works of Neumann, recalling the means by which he tried not to clutter the experience of pure color. Similarly, for Nakagami the removal of the trace of the hand of the creator of the work is a means of facilitating a meditative contemplation (1).”
Because he considers that Man does not master nature he lets natural processes develop in paintings. Nakagami does not reproduce the light of the natural world. The light in his paintings exists only in painting. The artist’s awareness of time in the concentrated moment in which light manifests itself is closely associated with the surprise of inadvertently encountering something ephemeral and sublime» (2).
Nakagami was born in Shizuoka in 1949. His works are in the collections of the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, the Museum of Modern Art in Osaka, the Museum of Modern Art in Yokohama, the Museum of Modern Art in Kamakura & Hayama, the Kanagawa Prefecture Gallery… Critics Donald Kuspit, Daniel Gauss, C.B. Liddell, Taney Roniger, Jonathan Goodman, Robert C. Morgan have written about his exhibitions.
(1) Kuspit, Donald. Kiyoshi Nakagami – Galerie Richard, Artforum, décembre 2012, p. 278-279.
(2) Yamanashi,Toshio.On the New Work of Kiyoshi Nakagami : Light from Afar, dans le catalogue Kiyoshi Nakagami, The Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura & Hayama, p. 15