YUGEN Gallery will hold Yuta Nakajima's solo exhibition "TRANSFER" from Saturday, March 25th to Thursday, March 30th, 2023.

first oil painting

Yuta Nakajima is an artist belonging to the creative unit Enlightenment. Since 2020, he has been working as an artist in earnest, and has created collage works that are full of erotic, grotesque, and nonsense, with cultural motifs from the postwar period to the 1980s.

Nakajima, who was born in Osaka Prefecture, wanted to become a designer because he thought that horizontal characters were cool, and moved to Tokyo after graduating from a design vocational school. He started his career as a graphic designer and has been active mainly in advertising. In addition to commercial work, he actively participates in group exhibitions and special exhibitions, and has won the Jury Prize and Kenji Tokumitsu Award at the 2021 contest-style art fair “UNKNOWN ASIA 2021”.

This exhibition "TRANSFER" is composed only of oil paintings, which Nakajima has recently started working on, changing his style from digital collage as the main method. 9 works including 7 new works drawn for this exhibition will be exhibited.

Everyone has seen it somewhere and is nostalgic. However, one scene of an old movie that is skipped in the present where everything is "fast". He collects them from the Internet and other sources, replaces them with oil paintings on canvas, which is a primitive medium, and creates new mental landscapes.

“When I select objects and scenes from old black-and-white movies and videos that strike a chord with me, and transfer the data to another place (transfer), friction occurs. It’s like a distortion of space-time.”

After creating a digital sketch, I put it on the canvas and layer the colors with oil paint. Nakajima's work, which blurs the outlines of characters and landscapes and transforms the familiar view, is reminiscent of the British painter Peter Doig.

depict human ignorance

A digital collage of photos you have taken yourself, scans of old books, and images collected on SNS. Nakajima has presented works colored with acrylic paint on top of that. From the screen composed of obscene motifs collected in an unprincipled manner, the logic as a graphic designer and the passion that would ruin it are mixed. What emerges is what can be said to be the work of humans.

Nakajima, who turns 30 this year, says that he admires the values ​​of the Showa era, where all the people listen to a singer sing in front of the TV. Music such as Hibari Misora ​​and Group Sounds that I always listened to in the car on the way to and from nursery school, and movies such as "Otoko wa Tsurai yo" that I watched all 50 works. She says that she especially likes the drama "Asura no Gotoku" written by Kuniko Mukoda, and she is strongly attracted to it because it depicts the emotions that are completely different and uncontrollable behind each human emotion. .

It's human nature to see hopeless sadness like a comedy. Nakajima's collage, which says, ``Without any sense of purpose, collects images that seem interesting and connects them together, creates an unexpected picture.'' It can be said that it is a manifestation of being.

"Karma" that appears in ordinary moments

Whether it's a collage or the oil paintings he worked on this time, Nakajima says that he moves his hands "unconsciously" without envisioning the final image. Nor does it contain any social messages.

“When I try to draw concretely, I only go for that purpose. I hope to live on."

The reason why I changed my method from digital collage to oil painting is that I wanted to experience the five senses of the flesh, such as the color, smell, and dirtiness of hands, which are not found in digital. Creation is "against self-consciousness", and it is the proof of human beings who do not live only for a purpose.

“On SNS, information changes every few seconds, and in our daily lives, we are constantly throwing out new information. There is no doubt that it is convenient, but I want to resist the fact that individuals are being treated more and more lightly.”

In a movie, the moment passes in less than a second. A scene I have seen many times in my life. Viewers of Nakajima's abstract paintings will feel that their own experiences and memories are overlaid on them, expanding the realm of their imagination. And we all know that the eternity of human work lurks in the most ordinary moments.

“Orange roof” is a work depicting a detached house. Although there is no sign of people, it certainly makes me think that it is connected to people's lives. In the midst of the emergence of new expressive techniques one after another, he paints human landscapes with paintings that can be said to be outdated. Nakajima's work as a writer is certainly manifested.