RIFF
13 Forest Gallery, Arlington MA
On view: September 28 - November 16, 2019
The paintings in Riff resulted from a long period of intensive commercial work, during which Nakayama sought fresh approaches to the laborious demands of sign painting. With accumulated insight, over the past year he returned to his artist studio to incorporate into abstract paintings the purely formal qualities of letters, not as bearers of meaning but as collections of line, shape and space.
Nakayama began each painting in this series by creating a background of broad, painterly brushstrokes. He then added letter forms, all of which he selected based on how they responded to the background composition and how well they fit together as visual sequences. The final, unbroken bands of letters do not read as lines of text; instead, they are reduced to basic compositional elements. Although Nakayama uses commercial lettering, he allows his brushstrokes to remain visible to reveal a hand-painting process he must conceal from his commercial work.
In addition to the paintings, Riff includes large collages of what began as Nakayama's hand-lettered practice sheets, which reveal the obsessive nature of his work as a sign painter. As assembled here, groupings of words encourage the viewer to read them as lists or sentences, but the incoherence of phrases they form undermines the process and shifts emphasis onto the letters’ integrity as aesthetic constructions.
The work in Riff began as a way for Nakayama to escape the all-consuming nature of his profession and utilize his considerable talent within an abstract, expressive context. Removed from the demands of clients and branding, this body of work is improvisational and intuitive while retaining a formal, graphic edge. As a meditative experiment, creating these paintings allowed the artist to challenge and examine his own artistic process, and to come to a deeper understanding of himself.
