MINORU NOMATA: CONTINUUM
White Cube is pleased to present Continuum, painter Minoru Nomata’s debut solo exhibition in London, titled after the artist’s recent series of the same name.
July 10 - August 24, 2024
Characterised by a lack of human presence, his works depict imaginary architectural structures and enigmatic landscapes that transcend time and place. Conjuring an unfamiliar world that is nonetheless tethered to reality, his visionary paintings evoke a disquieting sense of alienation. ‘Lack, deficiency, insecurity, isolation and the unknown called negative feelings can also be a creative trigger for me to create something’, the artist has said.
Over the past four decades, Nomata has developed a hybrid architectural language that fuses the industrial, fantastical, archaic and futuristic. The starting point of the artist – who sees ‘imaginary architecture’ as a visual language in its own right – is in Tokyo where he spent his childhood. In a commercial and industrial area where town factories and traditionally designed housing coexist, he became interested in a lexicon of structural elements such as chimneys and steel towers.
Nomata likens his process to ‘daydreaming in an awakened state of reality’; his paintings are not wholly Surrealist, nor can they be described as acts of pure imagination. As the artist has stated, ‘I have seen what was there already. I don’t feel like I’ve built it, I look at it’. Though the pervading atmosphere of the works is broadly inspired by science fiction, Nomata has cited the writings of Philip K. Dick, and the music of Brian Eno and Erik Satie as particular sources of inspiration.
In Nomata’s ‘Continuum’ series, solitary structures arise from low horizon lines, erupting towards the sky. Although many of these might be identified as ‘buildings’, their function and who they serve remains elusive. Continuum-5 (2023), for example, shows a glass tower set against a smoggy night sky, recalling the vast iron and glass constructions designed for 19th-century World’s Fairs – such as the Crystal Palace in London – but here it is made strange through elongation and its culmination in a bell-like curve.
The circle motif repeats throughout Nomata’s series – whether as a single, seemingly organic entity in Continuum 19 (2024), as components in the architectural assemblage of Continuum-3 (2023) or in the immense transparent balloons tethered to the ground in Continuum-6 (2024).
According to the artist, ‘construction, repair and demolition’ occur simultaneously in his paintings; they confer, too, upon the simultaneity of past, present and future distinct to Nomata’s work. As he states, he sets out to create worlds that ‘are not “somewhere”, but “nowhere”, in a position that helps [him] find a place to head for’.