The Moment and the Margin
Daisuke Nakano, who loved making things from early childhood, entered the design course of an art high school in Kyoto. As a high school student he encountered Nihonga. A painting of a camel he made at 19 was his first to be shown in a group exhibition. For some fifteen years thereafter he painted large works on the theme of various animals. Today he paints not only animals but plants and other subjects, using the techniques of Nihonga.
The Moment and the Margin
At this very moment, cranes are about to take flight. In a silver world of swirling snow, the breath of the gathered cranes tells of the cold of the north country. The animals Daisuke Nakano paints are given life as individuals with blood in their veins within the cycles of nature. The beauty of life carried on where human intention does not reach appears on the picture plane through Nakano's eyes. People, nature, animals: the cycles that surround us come before us as a new primal landscape through the essence of his aesthetics.
The beauty of the works Daisuke Nakano paints can be broadly divided into three essences. The first is the beauty of the animals and plants themselves: moments in which nature can be glimpsed just as it is. What gives that beauty form on the picture plane is the technique of Nihonga and his way of seeing. And what supports these two at the root, the foundation from which they rise on the picture plane, is what he has accumulated through his life and his primal landscape.
Animals, alive as individuals within nature, live out their roles within its providence. In the turning of the four seasons, grasses and trees put down roots in the earth, and animals enjoy their momentary lives. Animals and plants, each in its own time, celebrate their lives.
The flow of the four seasons dwells in our genes too. Have you ever felt nostalgia for a landscape you have never seen? The animals and plants in Nakano's works: even if it is a scene we have never actually seen, those of us born and living in Japan feel a sense of nostalgia. From the picture plane we share an emotion that seems to awaken a memory of the environment in which we live, or one that has run in our blood, as people born in Japan, since before our birth.
"I think there are two kinds of emotion: the emotion of freshness, and the emotion that comes from nostalgia," Daisuke Nakano says. The beauty that touches Nakano's heartstrings probably dwells in the heartstrings of many people. That is why, when we see his work, we feel a nostalgic emotion. Yet from his work comes not only nostalgia but also the emotion of freshness.
Cranes caught in an instant. The painterly quality of their placement and of the empty space comes from Daisuke Nakano's technique and originality. He entered the design course of an art high school in Kyoto; the reason, he said, was its freedom. A great variety of projects. Design learned in a free environment. And Nihonga, which he has painted since the age of 18. A calculation of sensibility, the adding and subtracting of margin and placement, gives the works Daisuke Nakano paints a new emotion that goes beyond a mere primal landscape.
The works of Daisuke Nakano depict animals and plants just as they are, and by adding an intention of sensibility to their placement, give us the emotions of both nostalgia and freshness. By using leaf and doing away with phenomenal time, he paints the time that belongs to the subject itself. The margin of the background sets a slight distance between motif and phenomenon. His works, expressed while always keeping a balance between what is lost because it is painting and what is born because it is painting, will surely go on capturing people's hearts.
Daisuke Nakano
Born in Kyoto Prefecture
First showed in a group exhibition at the age of 19 (Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum)
2019
Solo exhibition "Burst of Nature" (Ippodo New York)
"Painted Birds of Every Kind" (Saga Arashiyama Museum of Arts and Culture)
"A BRUSH WITH BEAUTY" (Indianapolis Museum of Art)
2020 Solo exhibition (Ginza Ippodo)
2021 Solo exhibition (Portland Japanese Garden, USA)
2025 Solo exhibition (Ginza Ippodo)
Collection: NEWFIELDS (Indianapolis Museum of Art)
