Yu Nishimura, Towards a Sea

It brings together a body of work comprising some fifty pieces, ranging from drawings to large-scale paintings, created over the last ten years, some of which have been created specifically for the exhibition. Towards a Sea highlights the artist’s explorations of the landscape - a space inhabited by presences and often bordered by the sea. Whether viewed from a train window or hidden by trees or houses, the sea has been a constant presence in Nishimura’s life since his childhood. Conceived as a meditative stroll, the exhibition is interwoven with human and animal figures, as well as plant and mineral motifs that overlap with the marine element. In his works, as in our memory, the imaginary merges with reality in enigmatic representations in which the locations permeate and haunt the figures. Working in oil and tempera, Nishimura transposes photographic and cinematographic principles into painting, thereby revisiting the Western pictorial genres of portraiture, landscape, and still life. Through blurring and layering effects, he imbues his works with a dreamlike and evanescent quality, lending them a certain sense of strangeness. Drawn to multiple details at once, the eye glides from one motif to another, from a close-up portrait to a full- length silhouette, from a human face to an animal head, from a bicycle wheel to the clouds reflecting on the sea. Towards a Sea reveals the artist’s focus on the beauty of the ordinary and the minute, and on the mysterious and complex nature of beings and things. Each work speaks to the transience of what surrounds us and passes through us, capturing a suspended world.