NYAB Event - Yasuo Nomura “Here and There”

Yasuo Nomura “Here and There”

hpgrp gallery

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hpgrp Gallery New York presents Here and There, a solo exhibition by Japanese artist Yasuo Nomura. Nomura’ s body of work enquires into the very essence of pictorial beauty by employing topics from religion, science as well as, in recent years, mathematical elements such as prime numbers and the golden ratio. In this exhibition, he took on the hefty challenge of merging universal themes from mathematics, physics and art, which served him as inspiration for a very distinct and novel collection of paintings.

Since the 19th century, the discovery of non-Euclidean geometry has had a great affect on the modernization of society. Projective geometry in particularly had been fundamental in creating the rules of linear perspective in Western Painting, and has found a renaissance in computer aided design. Nomura questions if the advanced scientific developments we have witnessed for decades, as exemplied by this new type of non-Euclidean geometry - an entity from beyond the realms of art - has managed to divide existing relationship between science and art. His work portends a deep schism in the reality of contemporary society, as deeply invested in technology as it has ever been, with the images which were validated by societies of the past. In Here and There Nomura asks: what if the history of art had evolved hand-in-hand with highly abstract groundbreaking theories, from projective geometry, to the discovery of non-Euclidean geometry to topology, and Riemannian geometry to non-commutative geometry - would the narrative of contemporary art remain the same?

In his artist’ s statement, Nomura denes painting as ” the art of manipulating multiple dimensions by capturing space onto a two-dimensional plane.” He strives to build a connection between art and contemporary theory in science that could not be achieved by traditional painting theory. With help from physicists and mathematicians, he has topologically created new landscape paintings that capture multidimensional natural phenomena, as defined by cutting-edge geometric theory, onto at, two-dimensional images. These works are informed by research for into techniques employed by Leonardo da Vinci and Hokusai Katsushika, which led him to reconsider their classic works, and a greater understanding that the golden ratio, 2 ratio and harmonic ratio were closely related to shapes already occurring in nature. Borrowing from the ancient rules of proportion while employing concepts from contemporary mathematics, Here and There proposes a new blueprint for a two-dimensional representation of beauty.

The title Here and There has multiple explanations: There is an historic tendency in Japan, to manipulate imported foreign culture to appear more “Japanese”. This extends to Buddhism, originally imported from India and China. In this light, according to Nomura, the Japanese version serves as a sort of “imitation”, when compared to its practice in its spiritual homeland.

The Japanese refer to the real world as shigan (here) more literally “temporary world”, and the afterlife as higan (there). The very core of Japanese aesthetics, pathos, impermanence and wabi-sabi (the acceptance of aws and aging) are strongly based on this idea. A recurring motif in his latest work is based on recent investigations of Mars and the Moon by NASA. The entire human race unites to escape Earth (shigan), with the idea of future settlement in outer space (higan). Moreover, the concept of channeling the three dimensions of reality (shigan) to artwork (higan) is essential in Nomura’ s employment of ground mapping data into painting.