TAB Event - Torawo Nakagawa "Call At"

This event has ended.
At Kodama Gallery Tokyo
Media: Painting, Art Party

Nakagawa's painting takes its starting point from contextless, apparently incoherent images resembling fragmentary landscapes that contain chains of mountains and thick, luxuriant forests, scenery that issues from his mind's eye. These landscapes give expression to a worldview that stands at the border of figuration and abstraction, with its beautiful colored surfaces and shapes that seem to be hidden away in the depths of the painting. The overlapping colors and lines collectively give rise to the discovery of new contours which are different from effects produced by the multiple layering of paint. Controlling these images is not the hand of Nakagawa himself, but rather the process of entrusting oneself to the canvas and eliminating the individual trace of the author and his technique, giving rise to an expressive painted surface that cannot be distinguished as either abstract or figurative. Such a process is vital to Nakagawa's work in his search to give expression to pure events and phenomena in an unaffected, unmediated way, one that occurs at an unconscious level, before conscious choices that are made as a result of visual information processed by the brain begin to take effect.
The works in this exhibition, in addition to the richness of color and structure of Nakagawa's previous work, evoke a faint sense of unease. This sensation is perhaps due to the errant lines on the pictorial surface and the trace left behind by the repetition of layered colors. These impressions also convey something of the laborious process and time expended in the period leading up to the completion of the painting.
The title of the exhibition, "Call At", evokes the idea of a visitation, or notification by way of sound. On the one hand, this refers to the act of appealing to or influencing someone else, while this directionality also hints at the impression given by the work that "visits" or "calls on" the viewer, prompting each individual viewer to respond and answer this "call" in their own way. While this is a fairly fixed posture that the work seems to operate with, this exhibition also demonstrates the expanding breadth and expressiveness of Nakagawa's work, the first to present his new works in 2 years.

Opening: June 21st (Sat) 18:00-

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• 2 people recommend this event: Ashley1981 (UK), ikehata_hana

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