NATSUYUKI NAKANISHI: DISSECTING PLATO'S CAVE ON CANVAS

Behind, Circle — VII 05

One of the greatest mysteries of art is what exactly the flat two-dimensional surface of the canvas is, and what it is for. The mundane answer, of course, is that it's a convenient rectangular surface on which to place and display aesthetically pleasing colors and lines. But this does not really explain the powerful effects that can be created on it or the fascination that it exercises on the minds of artists, such as Natsuyuki Nakanishi, who started his career as a Dadaist performance artist but is now one of Japan's most respected painters.

With an exhibition of new works at SCAI the Bathhouse in Tokyo, Nakanishi is keen to explain the philosophy that lies behind or within the large, vaguely floral or netlike abstract canvases that make up the show.

"Alberti said that painting is a window, but I think the eyes are more like the windows," the 74-year-old painter states, invoking the theories of Leon Battista Alberti, the Renaissance art theorist who first attempted to explain the mysteries of the 2-D canvas plane.

In a lengthy career that began with happenings carried out on Tokyo's Yamanote Line in the early 1960s and the joint founding with Jiro Takamatsu and Genpei Akasegawa of the Hi Red Center art performance group, Nakanishi has come a long way. Why did he turn his back on the anarchic Dadaism of those years and gravitate toward painting?

Mixing Platonic philosophy with quotes by the French post-Impressionist painter Paul Cezanne, Nakanishi explains that "the main reason is simply because I think painting is superior to performance and conceptual art.

"According to my idea, the real world is like Plato's parable of the cave. It's like we see things with a little light from outside or a very little light from a candle inside the cave. In other words, we see shadows and not the real world of ideas. Now this cave is like a cylinder and when you cut that in half, you create a flat surface. That is what the canvas is.

"Cezanne said we are in the drama of the spectacle and painters must show people what it is."

The spectacle that emerges on Nakanishi's canvases is abstract, suggesting that instead of the poor benighted creatures living their shadowy existences in Plato's cave, it is the fragments of light — Plato's metaphor for true insight — that Nakanishi is more interested in capturing.

The paintings also give the viewer a visceral sense of tension or confrontation between the artist and the canvas, as if the canvas was some kind of barrier, filter or film — an idea that Nakanishi is keen to engage.

"Some of my works are entitled S.F.F." he says. "It means screen, filter, and film. I consider the canvas to have those three qualities. With traditional Japanese screen paintings, painting makes sense not only as a screen but also as a partition. It isn't only about covering the canvas or the permeability of the canvas. The canvas can also separate."

Viewing a work like Behind, Circle — VII 05 (2005) in the gallery, though, the question inevitably arises, what does it separate? The prosaic answer is, of course, that it separates the viewer from the blank wall behind it, but if this is one's attitude, surely further visits to art galleries are pointless.

Instead, what Nakanishi's paintings invite us to do is to put ourselves in his shoes and enter into his way of thinking, seeing and feeling. Only by accepting this challenge can we get beyond the veneer of muted decorativeness that they initially present to something deeper.

For Nakanishi, the canvas is the dividing point between what he calls front space and back space, concepts he sees in both spatial and temporal terms. In other words, the painting is a frozen moment of the sort that Cezanne spoke of when he said, "Right now a moment is fleeting by! Capture its reality in paint! To do that we must put all else out of our minds. We must become that moment, make ourselves a sensitive recording plate, give the image of what we actually see, forgetting everything that has been seen before our time."

This is the attitude that one detects in Nakanishi's paintings, transposed from Cezanne's apples and pears to abstraction.

In Nakanishi we get a feeling of an artist responding with paint to the temporal and spatial sense triggered by his encounter with the canvas. At moments like this, the canvas becomes a portal through the wall of the gallery, rather than just a mere wall-covering.

"I think that paint already exists before it is applied to the canvas," Nakanishi says in the cryptic way common to mystics, charlatans and seekers after artistic truth. "There are two kinds of paint, the normal kind and another kind that doesn't exist. When I set up the canvas and approach it, and something occurs to me, I mix those two paints.

"My painting is a desire toward vagueness and a facing toward the unborn. My painting is a gesture to find out what this is and bring it closer to me."

C.B.Liddell
Japan Times
29th May, 2009