In this fabulous Minoru Nomata restrospective, the paintings in the very first room are already asking the questions that only grow more pointed and subtle over the course of his career…
Building or landscape?
Construction or destruction?
Past or future?
And then you look closer, and wonder why the only plants growing outside the oasis in the bubble are cactus.
As he moves from images of meticulously rendered heroic buildings that dwarf the only human figure in the exhibition…
to constructions that grow more and more grandiose and inexplicable…
he finally arrives at architectural behemoths whose impact on the surrounding landscape grows more and more devastating.
His use of skyscape to enhance a painting’s message becomes even more powerful as he moves on to explore the idea of air being a force like chi, the Asian concept of the life force that circulates within our bodies. His work often contrasts stormy clouds with vistas that are still and silent, and paints puffy, benign clouds behind his most disturbing constructions.
These images of balloons supporting a fragile and vertigo-inducing means of ascent…
and buildings with mysteriously deployed sails…
create a sense of unease and foreboding, despite the absence of obvious danger.
These are shown side by side with ever more explicit paintings of nature preserved in pretty bottles, looming over a surrounding landscape that is nearly devoid of life and diversity.
He takes a sharp stylistic detour into toxic colors with the series of “Skyglow” paintings he made in the years prior to the triple disaster of the 3/11 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown. They were actually inspired by uncontrolled industrial light spilling into the night sky, but they feel eerily clairvoyant.
In fact, Nomata was so affected by seeing the structures he painted only a few years before destroyed by the 2011 disaster that he was unable to paint for several years thereafter, and turned out only a handful of works. During that period, his pristine buildings and delicately deadly machinery gave way to images like this one, which appears to be an industrial ruin reflected in still water, but when one looks carefully, the bottom half represents the past, and the top, the post-disaster future.
Among these post-3/11 works is a fantastical classical city devoid of human beings, decaying silently under an unchanged sky…
…and what at first appears to be a gathering of wild animals that survived the extinction event turns out to be a collection of the stone fox figures that no longer have inari shrines to guard.
The final paintings in the exhibition—his most recent—feel more hopeful at first…until you realize that this is what his world would look like as it recovers from the scourge of humans. That after we’re gone, we’ll leave behind beautiful artifacts whose purpose will be lost in time before being slowly and silently swallowed by nature, until there are few signs that we were ever here.
If you’re in Tokyo and would like to see this exhibit before it closes, you’re in luck through next weekend!
Nomata Minoru/Continuum
Where: Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery
Dates: July 6 – September 24, 2023
Admission: ¥1400
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