西村一成　展覧会歴

The self-taught artist Issei Nishimura was born in 1978 in Aichi Prefecture, in south-central Japan. As a child, he displayed an aptitude for art-making and later, without receiving special training, he continued making drawings and paintings that reflected his abiding creative impulse. In Japan, Nishimura’s work has been shown in numerous exhibitions and has been recognized by various awards. In Kyoto, Galerie Miyawaki first presented the artist’s work in 2011 in an exhibition titled “Issei Nishimura Paintings: The Outer Surface of My Inner Self.”

In Japan, Nishimura’s art-making has been described as “uninhibited” and as conveying the artist’s “own desire,” which is sincere and seemingly unstoppable, to express himself in a visible, tangible way. Unfortunately, some observers have tended to romanticize Nishimura’s work in a manner that has been more distracting than illuminating. However, its feeling of immediacy and directness is its own allure.

With their bright, electric colors and unusual representations of plants or human forms, the images Nishimura produces are not easy to classify. In one picture, a man has a potato in place of a head. In another, a face is covered with eyeballs, and in a third the colors of a slice of cake drip off the canvas like the strange material of an otherworldly, self-destructing object.
-->> See Digital Catalog of the 50 selected paintings 2013-2014 by Issei Nishimura

Art like Nishimura’s comes from the still-unknown core somewhere in the human psyche where creativity resides. Insofar as it appears to reflect its maker’s pure, raw emotional-psychological energy and creative impulse, it is expressionistic art. Nishimura does not filter what he makes through any theoretical structures. Normally his mostly abstract images appear to be devoid of any overt, strictly limiting cultural references. Nishimura’s art somehow feels deeply personal. As a result, like much of the most appealing, intriguing abstract art, whatever he might intend for his images to mean - or maybe they have no intended meanings at all - they invite viewers to bring to them and read into them their own values, references, fantasies or interpretations.

In the works on view in Nishimura’s latest exhibition, “Issei and the Devil Blues,” ghoulish or half-formed faces emerge in some compositions, while others are completely abstract, made up of flurries of thick brushstrokes set against flatter, solid backgrounds or passages in which brushwork, linework and washes of transparent color collide. In one diptych painting, thickets of broad brushstrokes give shape to bunches of flowers emerging from some very malleable vases. In one panel of a triptych, a band of white fabric extends outward from the picture plane, surrounding a haunting green face that is set against a light-blue ground. Nishimura’s works, in which drawing plays a prominent role, are especially interesting. In the current exhibition, one work features an attentive cat rendered with a few fine, expertly placed lines. Another, with echoes of Jean Cocteau’s drawings of fantasy subjects, shows a close-up of a face with several mouths and eyes.