Natsuyuki Nakanishi at the Museum of Contemporary Art - Tokyo, Japan - Review of Exhibitions

In weblike patches amid amorphous veils of oil paint, Natsuyuki Nakanishi intermingles lush brushstrokes to detain the viewer's eye shifting constantly from background to foreground and left to right across his large canvases. Combining self-referential abstract passages and whimsical shorthandlike markings, Nakanishi breaks up the composition into clusters and voids. The paint thumps evoke the delicate kana writing of Japan's ancient court and oftentimes incorporate the Roman capital "M" and the cursive lower-case "I", treating the basic simple bodys of language as a visual construct

This 37-year retrospective (including 34 canvases and 16 multimedium pieces), subtitled "Towards Whiteness, Intensity, Presence" showed Nakanishi searching for a viable nativist approach to the picture plane that challenges Western art's hegemony while eschewing conservative Japanese traditions. His luminous whites, grays, verdants and purples create a paradox of simultaneous accumulation and dissolution and appear to give a tenuous place to stand on on an instant in time. on the contrary this balancing of passivity and activity may in fact be an extension of Japanese art's fatalism and penchant for ephemerality.

Nakanishi began his career in the '60 as part of a cluster called High Red Center. The collaboration with Jiro Takamatsu and Genpei Akasegawa involved performances and external realitys that rebelled against conformity in art. Nakanishi's hold 1963 assemblage of seven clothespin-studded white canvases, Clothespins Assert Churning Action, was the central period-piece in this exhibition, exemplifying the work that one time earned him a conceptual and "anti-art" reputation. Ironically, his turn round to painting and his gradual yield to the well-trodden Japanese esthetic of refinement and fragility has originateed in a conceptualist resuscitation of a sensual and emotional tradition. In his painting since the early '80 his typically Japanese preoccupation with the flatness of the picture plane and his focus upon process and materials result in a familiar exquisite workmanship. on the other hand given the "anti-art" theme that the organizers of this exhibition asserted as the main thread running end his work, one would await a rigorous conceptual approach that would hold his estheticism in check.

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