What Is Painted While Heading Toward the "Sea": Walking Through Yu Nishimura's First European Museum Solo Exhibition "Towards a Sea"
Yu Nishimura's first European museum solo exhibition, "Towards a Sea," is on view at Lafayette Anticipations.Summary
This article is an exhibition review in which the author walks through "Towards a Sea," Japanese painter Yu Nishimura's first solo exhibition at a European art institution. Nishimura's works start from photographs and memories captured during daily walks, yet they never aim at simple reproduction; instead, people and landscapes emerge as being in the process of formation. Figures whose gender and age remain unclear, small portraits of cats and dogs, and a seascape with a factory all coexist with traces of repainting and thinly diluted layers of paint, allowing the moment something begins to appear and the moment it disappears to occupy the same画面. The venue is Lafayette Anticipations, a contemporary art center of the Galerie Lafayette Foundation within walking distance of the Centre Pompidou. Inside the exterior of a late-19th-century former warehouse, OMA's movable floors create a singular space where visitors follow a double corridor like water ripples and encounter Nishimura's works. Curator Elsa Coustou explained that the exhibition was conceived as a road toward the "sea" that accompanies the production environment of an artist based in Japan. The display begins with the oldest work, "factory" (2018), followed by small portraits of cats and dogs and "gaze" (2023). For Nishimura, "portrait" is an atmosphere that resides not only in human faces but also in landscapes and animals, and the exchange in which we who gaze are looked back at turns the venue into a single "mental landscape."
(Source：美術手帖)