Sawako Nasu《A Piece of Landscape》No.024

Sawako Nasu speaks of distance, connection and relationship through the language of painting. “How can one reach the painting of the past?” she asks when looking back on her own practice. At the root of her work lies a gaze turned toward the absolute, unbridgeable distance that stretches between the classical and modernist paintings she loves — and the era they belong to — and herself, who stands in the present. It is precisely this sense of distance that gives her art its uncompromising vision. By placing the age of classical painting alongside the age to which she herself, as a contemporary person, belongs, and by working on what painting can still do, her stance moves beyond personal interest and takes on a present-day awareness: an attempt to search out what is possible at the tip of an art history that keeps on being rewritten.