Yu Nishimura’s Layered Art

From scenes, faces, and images that would not necessarily catch the eye, Yu Nishimura creates poetic, profound paintings.

Although the work produced by this artist, born in 1982, took several years to travel beyond Japanese borders, it caught the attention of local institutions such as the Taguchi Art Collection and the Kiyosu City Haruhi Art Museum. It now appears to have gathered momentum outside of Japan, and in late 2020 a first personal exhibition was organised in Europe by the Galerie Crèvecoeur (Paris) in parallel with the one held at the KAYOKOYUKI gallery in Tokyo.

An overlapping effect

Yu Nishimura’s paintings are based on simple compositions: portraits, animals, and objects, which are united by a technique that is specific to them. By overlapping layers, the artist aims, as he explains on the Tokyo gallery’s website, to represent ‘time that is not perceived’ and ‘multiple different times.’ Different stories, memories—his own or those of the viewer—temporalities, and ways of seeing or interpreting things are associated here.

These subtle paintings and the artist’s unusual technique ‘blur the frontiers between realism (related to photographic mimesis) and abstraction (the universe inherent to an image), between the foreground and the background, and between the different points of view from which the spectator looks at the painting’, explains the text published on the Galerie Crèvecœur’s website.

Aside from the portraits produced by Yu Nishimura, the pieces dedicated to representing a natural environment could be seen to tend towards abstraction, the edges blurring. They open up a new field of interpretation for the spectator, playing on the theme of memory, its erasure, and the reconstruction of images, which the eye might be tempted to realign.

Scene of beholder was an exhibition that was held from 16 October until 21 November 2020 at the Galerie Crèvecoeur in Paris. Around October was an exhibition that took place from 24 October until 29 November 2020 at the KAYOKOYUKI gallery in Tokyo.