each passing day Shota Nakamura

Peres Projects is pleased to present each passing day, Shota Nakamura’s (b. 1987 in Yamanashi, JP) second solo exhibition at the Berlin gallery.

 

In night drawing (2022), a male figure leans over the pages of a book while a fluid red path leads from his desk into a forested landscape. Nakamura’s paintings are portals which extend into other realms – his compositions depicting a leaky boundary between domestic and wild spaces, invites the viewer into his kaleidoscopic worlds.  

 

Nakamura takes up the question posed by British anthropologist Tim Ingold, “What is the difference between walking on the ground, in the landscapes of ‘real life’, and walking in the imagination, as in reading, writing, painting or listening to music?”. His paintings deal with transitions and liminal spaces. Building on his two most recent solo exhibitions, the somnambulant figures, walkers and readers in each passing day move through the landscapes of real and imaginary worlds. In fact, many of the figures appear to be in a state of becoming one with their surroundings, as elongated bodies resemble flower stems, hats take after the leaves on the trees and color palettes that blends with the landscape. The distinction between figure and landscape is softened.

 

In Nakamura’s most self-reflexive exhibition to date, each passing day is an expression of how we make, encounter and hold images. Made up of mostly oil paintings, the works weave together an analogy between creating images and imagining worlds. In reflecting on the image research that is so critical to his practice, Nakamura’s paintings digest the churning of our present. His response is a calm stillness, relieving the viewer from the relentless influx of images and media. 

 

Nakamura obscures the distinction between fore and background, as well as subjectivity, which can be understood as a metaphor for the collapse of hierarchy between humans and the natural world. 

 

This is Nakamura’s second solo exhibition with Peres Projects in our Berlin gallery. His solo exhibition, Walking, was recently on view at the Ilwoo Space in Seoul. Other solo exhibitions include Blind, Morioka Shoten, Tokyo, Mai, grüner Wald, Gallery Trax, Yamanashi and Play Of Sunlight, AGORA Collective, Berlin. In addition, Nakamura has exhibited in a number of international group exhibitions Male Nudes: a salon from 1800 to 2021, Mendes Wood DM, Sao Paulo, Rose Is A Rose Is A Rose, Jack Hanley Gallery, New York and In Bloom, Belsunce Projects, Marseille.