The expression of the sensitive.
Nao Kaneko's paintings are not revealed at first glance: one must enter them and remain there.
Her most recent works are large without being physically excessive, inspired by the landscape, but they free themselves from it to retain only a distant reference, generally indicated by the title.
The painter draws her inspiration from expanses near the sea, riverbanks—especially the Seine where it is not completely disfigured—from those spaces and moments where skies, clouds, and water mingle, from gardens too, but even more so from landscapes revisited or reinterpreted by certain painters, particularly Monet for his gardens and impressions of light and mist.
What all these paintings share is their soft, pale, diffuse colors, with a strong dominance of blues and whites, sometimes sunny or enlivened by red, yellow, or green marks. There's more to this general color tone—an art of treating the surface by making the coatings deep and "speaking," subtly and lightly mixing plaster with them, then adding, sanding, and adding more colors and drips of paint. The attentive eye enters into the density and the long duration of the process: a Kaneko painting is never simply blue on a background—it's a story, a time of work, layers of material, and also a way for the painter to be present during these operations...
Excerpt from a text by Yves Michaud in the catalog Nao Kaneko – l'Horizon infini,
Éditions lapin rouge, 2016.
Read more
