Lafayette Anticipations presents the first major institutional solo exhibition in France of Japanese painter Yu Nishimura. It brings together a collection of around fifty works ranging from drawings to large-format paintings, created over the past ten years, some of which were specifically conceived for this occasion.
The exhibition Towards a Sea highlights the artist's explorations around landscape, a space inhabited by presences and often bordered by the sea. Seen from the window of a train, concealed by trees or houses, the sea has accompanied Nishimura since childhood. Conceived as a meditative walk, the exhibition is traversed by human and animal figures, plant and mineral motifs that overlap with the marine element. In his works, as in our memories, imagination adds to reality in enigmatic representations, where places impregnate and haunt the figures. Working with oil and tempera, Nishimura transposes photographic and cinematographic principles to painting, while revisiting Western pictorial genres such as portrait, landscape, and still life. Through effects of blur and superposition, he infuses the works with a dreamlike and evanescent dimension, tinting them with a certain 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 reflections of clouds in the sea. Towards a Sea testifies to the attention the artist devotes to the beauty of the ordinary and the minute, to the mysterious and complex dimension of beings and things. Each work speaks of the transience of what surrounds us and what passes through us, capturing a world in suspense. Curator: Elsa Coustou Cover image: Yu Nishimura, gaze, 2023, oil on canvas, 145.5 × 112 cm. Courtesy the artist, Tantan Global Partners and Crèvecœur, Paris. Photo Alex Kostromin
Source: paris.fr — photo: Yu Nishimura Poster