Kiyoshi Nakagami

POETICS OF SHADOW
January 25, 2025

There is a transtemporal desire among living beings to see the light, and among painters, an insatiable longing to represent it. Kiyoshi Nakagami has dedicated his life to the pursuit of true light in painting. From the depths of darkness, a hypnotic glow emerges in his works, preserving a certain ambiguity in its nature. An intense dialogue of light and shadow, skillfully orchestrated.

Over three decades, the artist has perfected a unique technique through an alchemical mastery of matter. He pours pigment and mica over dark stratifications, allowing gravity to guide the formation of golden waves that subtly expand. The contrast between dense shadows and luminous gradients reveals light in its fullest splendor and depth. Each painting vibrates, charged with energy as if physically emitting its radiance.

Though the forms emerging from darkness may evoke skies, mountains, or waterfalls, Nakagami's goal is not to depict reality. Instead, he seeks the presence of a light that is both fundamentally pictorial and deeply spiritual and philosophical. Influenced by his interest in consciousness studies and Jungian theory, the artist fosters a meditative contemplation that invites introspection.

His work also conjures a light that seems to come from a distant past—from the origins of the world. The radiant nodal point acts as what Deleuze might describe as "the place of cosmogony": the primordial center from which the universe unfolds, the beginning of all things. Nakagami appears to suspend the sublime moment in which nothingness embraced the first dance of atoms and the elements were born.

The painter’s ability to sculpt shadow and create images that foster an intercommunication between his inner world, ours, and the vastness of the abyss is remarkable.

Poetics of Shadow invites the audience to navigate the boundaries between perception, reflection, and spirituality through a heightened sensory experience, amplified by a site-specific sound installation designed by Morrigan Z + Espctrl.

 
Josephine Dorr, curator
Mexico City

This track offers a sensory experience that activates both emotion and intellect. Its sound design does not aim to narrate but to provoke, inviting the audience to navigate the boundaries between perception, reflection, and spirituality. In this journey, sound becomes the key to unraveling what lies within the shadows: absence and fullness.

- released on January 25, 2025