Kiyoshi Nakagami

Colector presents the first exhibition of artist Kiyoshi Nakagami in Latin America, featuring a selection of news paintings. Curated by Josephine Dorr.

Kiyoshi Nakagami (1949, Shizuoka, Japan) is one of the most respected artists in his country. His work is part of the collections of the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, the Museum of Modern Art in Osaka, the Museum of Modern Art in Yokohama, the Museum of Modern Art in Kamakura & Hayama, and the Kanagawa Prefectural Gallery, among other institutions.

Poetics of Shadow

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.