Masumi Nakaoka: Towards Gentle Ovals

It has been a year since Nakaoka held the one-person show at Art Front Gallery, Margin of Landscape, last autumn. She traced the outlines of landscapes, then cut them out, and gave them new layouts and colors. She used a variety of media, even things like cashew, to give the white backgrounds. Nakaoka made these elements into two-dimensional works notable for the mysterious materiality of their vacant spaces. She deployed her unique technique, freely moving between the representational and the abstract, or between an actual landscape and its image. At her VOCA exhibition in 2007, and her show at Art Front Gallery previous to Margin of Landscape, in 2009, she reorganised realities on the picture surfaces to such an extent that viewers could no longer discern what it was that had been drawn in the light and tactful color of the gentle backgrounds. These were not the objects made to replace reality. There was no need to dwell on their distance from that reality, nor on how the artist had interpret it. Her works were more like two dimensional objects in their own rights, that people had to accept with their sensory organs.
Last year’s exhibition then began to show the beginnings of change. For example, viewers were able to read representational features, such as a window. It was a surprise that Nakaoka has started to include these things, and there was considerable interest in how she would develop. Freshness, her signature quality, remains. But we tell from her titles that she draws rough motifs, such as concrete blocks used to prevent landslides, or quarry landscapes, showing a high degree of originality. But we can now read back from her artist's eye and creative method to a real thing, as was previously impossible. Nakaoka has altered the relationship between the painter and the viewer.
This exhibition includes both drawings and works on canvas, providing an opportunity to witness the wide thinking processes of this artist. It shows different themes in each exhibition space, including motifs Nakaoka has never used before, such as ruins. The exhibition will reveal the artist’s steps towards a new horizon.

Toshio Kondo, Art Front Gallery