Makiko Nakamura's paintings relate to the rhythms and patterns of our lives, the fleeting nature of experience, the workings of memory and our most intense feelings. Yet the elements of her artistic language suggest the coolness of minimalist abstraction. Her is structured on the circle, the square and the grid. These basic elements are arranged in orderly patterns to form an underlying armature. This armature is subject to a process of disappearance and reappearance, discovery and rediscovery, as successive layers of paint are applied and sanded back.
The final, burnished surfaces are windows into the complexity of myriad, amalgamated layers. Colour is facetted, iridescent, jewel-like: sumptuous pinks and reds, azure and cerulean blues, plush deep greens, glowing and creamy whites, dark grey flecks, moon silver and solar gold. The paintings are also windows on time. Time is at the heart of the work, from the seconds, minutes and hours of our days to the celestial choreography of the heavens, measured in astronomical time, and overseeing our lives.
Each painting presents us with a crystalline present moment, evoking time past, present and future, a contemplative instant. One of the artist's early memories is of sheltering under a favourite cherry tree and looking upwards as thousands of petals fluttered down. In that startling vision, she felt, all of nature was suddenly alive, and that sensation is captured perfectly in her work.
Born in the inland city of Gifu in Japan, Makiko Nakamura spent a great deal of her childhood in the care of grandparents following her father's early death. Her grandfather taught her traditional Japanese brush painting, and she went on to study art and film in Kyoto and Nagoya. She then worked as a film editor while establishing herself as a painter, but when her mother died she felt it was time to leave Japan. Her late father's love for French culture and cuisine, and her passion for the writing of Samuel Beckett led her to Paris. Several years later she took up an artist residency in Philadelphia, PA, before settling in Dublin, which she found enormously stimulating for her painting. Now based in Kyoto, she exhibits regularly in Dublin and London. The "repetition, fear and beauty" of Beckett's work is a profound influence on her own.
Aidan Dunn, October 2024