Tomio Koyama Gallery Tennozu is pleased to present “Life,” an exhibition by Satoko Nachi. This will be the artist’s fourth solo exhibition at the gallery and the first in nine years, presenting new paintings and drawings that demonstrate a significant shift in her practice.
【About Satoko Nachi and her works
-From Others to the Self: how her reasons for painting have shifted, and the subjects she chooses to convey her thoughts and intentions have changed】
In the early stages of her career, including her first solo exhibition in 2010, Nachi sublimated the euphoria and pain of young love into large paintings as “self-portraits” with her exquisite powers of depiction. She expressed in her works her feelings of lost love, emotional turmoil, resignation, passion, desire for others to know who she is, and to convey a sense of that self to others, and the relationship and thoughts that she shared with her significant other, as if they were love letters.
That is why in 2016, while participating in the Ohara Museum of Art’s artist-in-residence project “ARCO,” Nachi found herself inspired by the rich abundance of nature and realized the pure joy of painting without the presence of the opposite sex. The subjects of her paintings became more fundamental, manifesting themselves in her work as a human figure reflected in clumps of bushes suffused with a fresh, invigorating light.
During her residency in Paris in 2019, Nachi began to use the primary colors that she had always loved. Nachi, who up until now had always suppressed her own tastes as much as possible, choosing colors, compositions, and sizes so that the message she wanted to convey would get across, became honest about her own tastes and preferences.
The new works featured in this exhibition were painted after Nachi relocated following her marriage in 2022. At first, she found herself bewildered by her strange and unfamiliar surroundings and the lifestyle and time that she could not control on her own, leaving her oppressed and feeling as if she could not deal with these changes.
It was during this time that Nachi says she began to cling to the past, to the point where memories of what had been threatened to spill over whenever she picked up something new. She wanted to paint these feelings while they were still vivid. She would make oil paintings during the day and works on paper at night in order to escape from her frustration and impatience, and to vent her feelings. Her works became like a diary of her daily life.
【About this exhibition and Nachi’s new works
-The sense of communication between the body and the paint
A new kind of self-existence that reveals itself through people, life, time, and memory】
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As I was tempering the paint on my palette, I suddenly had the sensation that I was kneading something that I had scraped off from my own arm.
When I put the finished paint on the canvas, I felt that it was still warm, fresh, and almost alive.
Shaking my head, I tried to wipe it off, or scratch it out with a knife. As the paint melted into the turpentine, I felt as if it had become part of me.
My translucent fingernails became stained with bits of flesh and blood.
When I ran out of paint, I would scrape some off my other arm.
Half jokingly, I told myself that if I kept doing this, one day I would just disappear.
At the same time, I found myself strangely convinced that this was how my paintings were going to be created.
Satoko Nachi
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In these new works, Nachi no longer portrays herself in the manner of a self-portrait. The act of confronting life and forgetting the past, and the realization that people like her parents change and age, have influenced her work.
In her new work I Cannot Accept It, Nachi visits Mount Aso with her husband to see the sunrise and is moved by its grandeur and silent presence. Even so, she finds herself resisting what is new — a feeling that she articulates by turning the mountain upside down at the end. Nachi is surprised to discover something of herself in the painting, even if it is not a self-portrait, and this work opens up new possibilities for expression.
In her recent works, Nachi has had the strange feeling that the substance of paint is linked to her body, a situation that she depicts in A Painter’s Life and A Glass of Hope as a memory of the milestones in her life and the notable things she has accomplished. Alcohol always comes back to her, in combination with her memories. A Glass of Hope is a painting that serves as a memory of this incident.
Even though the genesis of these new works can be traced to a difficult situation, Nachi says that the creation of the works on paper in particular was a rewarding process that allowed her to reveal her emotions at the time.
People, life, time, and memory. As Nachi has come to confront herself as a result of sharing her life with others, her latest worldview involves a shift from works produced for the sake of others, towards a practice that is undertaken for her own self. We hope you will take this opportunity to view her most recent pieces.
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For press inquiries, please contact: press@tomiokoyamagallery.com (Makiko Okado)
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