White Dice is happy to current Continuum, painter Minoru Nomata’s debut solo exhibition in London, titled after the artist’s latest sequence of the identical identify. Characterised by a scarcity of human presence, his works depict imaginary architectural buildings and enigmatic landscapes that transcend time and place. Conjuring an unfamiliar world that’s nonetheless tethered to actuality, his visionary work evoke a disquieting sense of alienation. ‘Lack, deficiency, insecurity, isolation and the unknown – these so-called unfavourable emotions can be a artistic set off for me to create one thing’, the artist has mentioned.
Over the previous 4 many years, Nomata has developed a hybrid architectural language that fuses the commercial, fantastical, archaic and futuristic. The start line of the artist – who sees ‘imaginary structure’ as a visible language in its personal proper – is in Tokyo the place he spent his childhood. In a industrial and industrial space the place city factories and historically designed housing coexist, he turned all in favour of a lexicon of structural components equivalent to chimneys and metal towers. Particularly in Tokyo within the mid-Nineteen Sixties, city growth was actively carried out earlier than the Olympics, and with expectations for a brand new metropolis raised excessive within the development of Tokyo Tower, Nomata appeared to entry a glimpse of the long run.
Rendered with meticulous precision, his scenes usually function towering edifices, intricate skeletal frameworks, spherical varieties or wind-powered equipment. The distinctive color palette that Nomata employs is muted and atmospheric – shades of stone-grey, white and sepia interspersed with subdued blues and greens – which boosts the dreamlike high quality of his constructed realms. The artist’s use of a comparatively flat type and shallow depth of discipline additional enforces this impression of the constructed world, a dimension of which is the theatrical. Bathed in a targeted, directional gentle, buildings equivalent to these in Continuum-1 (2024) come to resemble items on a stage set towards simulated backdrops of hazy cloud and sky formations.
Nomata likens his course of to ‘daydreaming in an woke up state of actuality’; his work aren’t wholly Surrealist, nor can they be described as acts of pure creativeness. Because the artist has said, ‘I’ve seen what was there already. I don’t really feel like I’ve constructed it, I take a look at it’. Although the pervading ambiance of the works is broadly impressed by science fiction, Nomata has cited the writings of Philip Ok. Dick, and the music of Brian Eno and Erik Satie as explicit sources of inspiration. When working, the artist makes use of music to ‘amplify’ his imagery, enabling him to ‘think about one thing wider, deeper, and extra lasting’. The artist attracts from a private archive of over fifty scrapbooks, that are crammed with pictures culled from magazines and newspapers, in addition to tv programmes that target historical past, arithmetic and astrophysics. Starting by creating sketches from this materials, he then transforms these over months, years and even many years. The syncretic visible language that outcomes attracts upon art-historical references as wide-ranging as Greek and Roman structure, the early works of Henri Rousseau, the visible kinetics of Op Artwork, the machine-age aesthetic of the American Precisionist painter Charles Sheeler and the visions of Giorgio de Chirico and René Magritte.
In Nomata’s ‘Continuum’ sequence, solitary buildings come up from low horizon strains, erupting in the direction of the sky. Though many of those may be recognized as ‘buildings’, their perform and who they serve stays elusive. Continuum-5 (2023), for instance, exhibits a glass tower set towards a smoggy night time sky, recalling the huge iron and glass constructions designed for Nineteenth-century World’s Gala’s – such because the Crystal Palace in London – however right here it’s made unusual by means of elongation and its end result in a bell-like curve. There are not any obvious entrances or exits, though the helix of paint that circles the inside might point out a staircase, albeit with no clear starting or finish. A colossal tree is erected inside, its progress compelled into the narrowing upwards trajectory of the glasshouse, whereas foliage creeps throughout the outside planes of the constructing. As with lots of Nomata’s works from this sequence, a way of placelessness pervades the scene, which exists someplace between a dystopian future and a mythic previous.
Elsewhere within the exhibition, Nomata turns his consideration from the aerial to the aqueous, depicting large-scale hydrological formations, equivalent to icebergs, frozen waterfalls and broad vistas of glaciers, as he has executed in Think about-1 (2018). In Continuum-12 (2024), two unnaturally spherical ice lots are bisected by the ocean’s floor, the one above the water line tapered right into a slight level. The circle motif repeats all through Nomata’s sequence – whether or not as a single, seemingly natural entity in Continuum 19 (2024), as elements within the architectural assemblage of Continuum-3 (2023) or within the immense clear balloons tethered to the bottom in Continuum-6 (2024). In Continuum-21 (2024) Nomata depicts a boat-like development on the water, seemingly pushed by a mix of hydraulic and aerodynamic gear. In quite a few work, mechanical interventions protrude or interrupt in any other case serene landscapes, as if to put human endeavour in rivalry with the chic drive of nature.
Based on the artist, ‘development, restore and demolition’ happen concurrently in his work; they confer, too, upon the simultaneity of previous, current and future distinct to Nomata’s work. As he states, he units out to create worlds that ‘aren’t “someplace”, however “nowhere”, able that helps [him] discover a place to move for’. Devoid of identifiable temporal or geographical markers as they might be, Nomata’s ambivalent landscapes communicate on to humankind’s long-standing existential considerations about what place, if any, it has on the earth.
Minoru Nomata (b.1955) lives and works in Tokyo.
