Peres Projects is pleased to present dear moon, Shota Nakamura’s first solo exhibition at the gallery.

Balancing between visual abundance and quiet restraint, Shota Nakamura’s new works explore dreamscapes as a bridge between our domestic spaces and the natural world. The sleeping figure which is recurrent in this body of works, and a relatively new feature explored by the artist, is the site of this double location – sprawled out across both bedroom and forest floors.

To experience these works, is also to experience Nakamura’s pace – the sense of time embedded in the paintings instigate a temporal down shift, a deep breath, the greatest luxury of all – stillness. This extended time does not belong to the flimsiness of reverie, but is a property of the non-intention in deep and heavy sleep.

Nakamura’s paintings explore dreaming and what is let go in the subconscious, what is powerful in dream images where desire and absurdity are the overriding generic structures. There is a quality of softness to his fantasy, desire that is delicately wrapped in the imagination. This sense of romance is discrete, and thereby generous – cultivating space for the projection of our own ideas and desires, a threshold to a sensual world where the boundaries are not yet prescribed.

Found images and art historical references are integral to the artist’s composition process. In dear moon, Nakamura draws from European modernism to explore both the dream world as well as our connection with nature. Birds and flowers which have been central to Nakamura’s paintings, show up in these works in relation to the body, his signature natural landscapes layered within domestic spaces.

That these bright and textured ecosystems are the encompassing material for scenes of pleasure and repose, making those scenes possible, is evident to the viewer. Nakamura’s environment as both site and product of desire, imagines a relation of balance and harmony between us and our habitat.

This exhibition of new paintings by Nakamura fluctuates between abstract shapes and specific figures, which serve as metaphors of the transportive power of desire. The immense generosity of Nakamura’s detailed, painted work is mobilized in this meditation on masculinity and its capacity for tenderness.