Nanae Mitobe “DEPTH -Blue Pigment-“
We visited “gallery N,” where Nanae Mitobe’s solo exhibition “DEPTH -Blue Pigment-” is being held. The gallery is a 7–8 minute walk from Motoyama Station in Nagoya.
Nanae Mitobe is a young artist known for her bold use of paint, with faces as her recurring motif.
Last year I went to Europe and drew hundreds of sketches of birds.
After returning home I turned dozens of the bird sketches into tableaux.
But perhaps what I wanted to paint was not birds, but that blue sky.
Impulsively, I poured blue pigment over the face painting I had been struggling with for over a year and could not finish.
The face I had clung to was assimilated by the blue pigment into a landscape of sky, and was naturally replaced.
Because of this blue, the traces of my brush and knife strokes disappeared entirely, yet that blue sky — a deep, cavernous blue — emerged on the surface.
Just as distant mountains appear blue when you gaze at the sky, the blue painting seemed to recede from me.
Another meaning of blue is the blue-black of a bruise; and sometimes a bruise turns yellow, into a coquettish purple, with a faint green showing through from beneath the skin.
When I grip a PET bottle my palm reddens like the veins of a leaf.
Blue marble and a gold ring shear off my hair.
I cannot feel the sensation of packing my travel luggage into a bag. — Nanae Mitobe
The piece that caught this writer’s eye was《DEPTH BLUE》. Its complex combination of blues made for a truly beautiful work.
The texture of the linen canvas is excellent and the balance feels just right. The traces of brushstrokes press forward toward the viewer, brimming with power. At the same time the work has a high aesthetic completeness — the kind of piece that makes you think “This is it!” at first sight (sold).
It was purchased by Ryutaro Takahashi, known for the Takahashi Collection. With only a few works on display, one might mutter a small complaint about him snapping up two of them — but honestly, one has to admire his taste in collecting truly good work.
The pieces featured on the DM look flat when seen from the front, but up close they are so thickly painted that they could almost be called three-dimensional works. *All the paintings are titled《DEPTH BLUE》.
Seen from the side, you can tell these are strikingly impastoed works.
The artist repeatedly squeezes paint from tubes, using so much that she is left too exhausted to hold a brush (these days the manufacturer provides paint to her in a special format, so the process has become more efficient).
She insists on treating this as painting, so she carefully applies the paint to the canvas with brush and knife. It would be easier to pile it on by hand, but that’s not her method.
Nanae Mitobe’s fastidiousness shows in her choice of paint as well — even the deepest layers, buried under everything else, are made with her preferred paints. She turns a deaf ear to advice like “Just use cheap Chinese paint for the underlayers.” Given how much paint she uses, the material cost must be considerable.
“Blue,” the theme color of the exhibition, appears in many different shades from work to work.
At galleries, prices usually vary by the size of the work, but here the price seems to vary with the amount of paint used. Given the quantities involved, that’s only natural.
The two《DRAWING》pieces were made earlier and the artist decided to include them in this exhibition, though they are not for sale.
The number of works was limited, but the force of each piece made for a wonderful solo exhibition.
The use of paint is intense, and it left me wanting to know more about the background and process of creation.
She likely paints with the canvas laid flat; there must be an added tension when she stands the canvas upright.
Works in which the act of painting produces something sculptural draw one’s attention to the gravitational relationship between paint and canvas. There was something uncanny about viewing them — a sense that they transcend the usual boundaries of painting.
I look forward to seeing what she does next.
