Additional Images

Provenance:

Private Collection, Toronto

Literature:

Kazuo Nakamura, quoted in Dorothy Cameron, Sculpture ’67, unpaginated.

Note:

“The contribution of the artist is to extend visual knowledge as a way of understanding our universe. I, as an artist, am never wholly isolated from anyone else, from the labourer or the scientist. We are all, each in his own way, making a new society, or a part of that society. On the other hand, since some perception and foresight beyond the norm is a necessary attribute of the functioning artist, I must admit to a certain sense of unavoidable ‘apartness.’”

Viewing mathematics as a key to form and design, Nakamura formulated artwork that was both alluring and precisely ordered. Atop a backdrop of indigo, the artist places bands of white, mimicking foolscap. His lines are clean, intersecting only with a circular porthole, a window to a landscape. Mirroring the small, diagonal brushstrokes of Cézanne, Nakamura creates a terrain of greens and blues. His restricted palette excites both the eye and the mind, like Euclidean geometry played out in a bloom of algae.