Yu Nishimura: Clearing Unfolds

The body of work on view was inspired by Nishimura’s recent trip to his hometown of Yokodai—a suburb situated near the Port of Yokohama in Kanagawa Prefecture—where he spent his formative childhood and early teenage years in the 1990s. Marked by a unique arrangement of towering housing complexes built next to grassy fields, forests, and vacant lots, Yokodai has contributed greatly to the development of the artist’s subject matter and unique visual language.

The artist approaches painting as an act of continuous discovery, in which any given shape or hue only fully reveals itself once it is applied to the canvas and adopts its own texture and dimensionality. In one group of paintings on view, Nishimura portrays solitary figures in strange and fragmented naturescapes. Exploring concepts of restraint and recollection, the artist allows colors to mutate and fade away in these works as a visual analogue to the workings of human memory. Nishimura takes a similar approach when painting his portrait busts, which make up another central aspect of his oeuvre; in these compositions, rather than aiming to depict a specific individual, he instead builds up his canvas with numerous layers of diaphanous oils until the figure before him seems to arrive at a distinct personality. On view alongside these intimate paintings is a suite of pastel-on-paper portraits that originate from a single sketchbook and possess an unprecedented material immediacy.