Softly Reductive Ⅰ 柔かに、還元Ⅰ

In the 1960s, Natsuyuki Nakanishi energetically explored the possibilities of“direct action”in performances and events carried out with Jiro Takamatsu and Genpel Akasegawa in a group called "Hi-red Center". He also collaborated in making stage designs for the avant-garde dancer, Tatsumi Hijikata. After pursuing radical“anti-art”practices during the sixties, Nakanishi returned to painting. He seems to have been mainly concerned with locating the place where painting originates. In "Tangent Arc", painted in 1978, he made a small bamboo bow and attached it to the canvas so that it touches the surface at one place. Nakanishi envisioned the surface of the painting as a vertical planar membrane with a huge circle extending behind the painter and the viewer which touches its surface at one point. Painting is a kind of device employing spatial structures that causes it to be seen. In "Painting for Summer",painted in 1981, nine marks are printed in the center of the canvas, forming a symmetrical oval. These forms appear before the eyes of the viewer like the remains of some sort of solemn ritual. "Softly Reductive" is a series of paintings executed for a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo in 1997. The focus shifts with the wandering of the viewer's eye, generating a freer,more diffused space. There have been gradual changes in Nakanishi's motifs and styles, but he has continued to re-enact the primal generation of painting in his work and to identify the place where it originates. By doing so, he has explored the essence of painting with an extremely unique approach.