Masumi Nakaoka: Buffer

Over the last few years, Nakaoka’s work has moved from the abstract to the representational. Many of her pieces exhibited in 2007 and 2008 at VOCA, INAX Gallery and Daiichi-Life South Gallery were made with impressive expanses of white possessing a profound sense of materiality. On the top of this other colours were placed, flat, in an exquisite balance. These were abstract paintings, so beautiful that one was happy to pay no attention to the objects depicted. Apparently, Nakaoka first photographed attractive landscapes (and surely the photographs themselves were impressive) and used these as the bases of her work. Her art was the outcome of various processes aimed at finding an order in beauty. It took final form as purified landscapes, after removal of all surplus things, reducing the image to what was absolutely necessary. We beheld tableaux, that were ‘something’ though not really now a landscape.

Nakaoka shifted to the representation of such seemingly inappropriate things as a gravel quarry, a concrete retaining wall, or guardrails, consciously placed centrally in a beautiful landscape, so as to jar the viewer. This was surely done to evade systematic construction of a ‘beautiful’ picture plane based on established principles. She now incorporates elements usually avoided by a landscape painter. It was perhaps natural that Nakaoka has gradually inclined to representational painting, for the selection of a certain something to be drawn is crucial creative act. Nakaoka shuns any sentimentality in the brushwork. The resulting picture is dignified and impeccable, with an elaborately undulating finish possessing a strong, white materiality. It is magnificent and particular to her. Nakaoka’s creative trajectory finally led to the notion of a ‘buffer’, which is the title of this exhibition.

Although a buffer can be something to cushion or soften impact, it nowadays more often has a computerised-information meaning, referring to a function to moderate the gap in data-transfer speeds. Art Front Gallery considered other options, such as ‘shock absorber’, ‘conversion’, or ‘transition’, but those did not convey the additional sense of an irritating wait for a data image to appear. Thus we came to the concept of the buffer. I also see in Nakaoka’s work an automatic accumulation of the landscape itself, there in front of the eyes, as by a machine. Nakaoka’s representation of this is something new.