BRUSSELS.- Mendes Wood DM is presenting seven lakes, Shota Nakamura’s first solo presentation with the gallery and his first solo exhibition in Belgium. The show returns to the desaturated, dreamlike terrain of Nakamura, an artist who works as readily from memory as from observation.
The Brussels space, with its fireplaces and separate rooms that distinguish it from a white cube, set Nakamura thinking about scale, and he has approached much of the exhibition through medium and small formats as an antimonumentalist choice. The choice plays on a dialectic built into a foundational premise of landscape painting: outdoor observation is returned to us, in miniature, to be viewed indoors. “With a small painting, you have to physically come closer to it,” he says. “Because of the scale, a very small mark or a slight shift in color can become surprisingly significant.” Throughout, Nakamura returns often to lakes and to clouds. Asked where his attachment to water comes from, he is parsimonious with explanation, offering only the plainest one. “I like water,” he says of it. But behind that simplicity sits rigorous practice, a watercolor discipline he trains at a format smaller still before carrying its immediacy and indeterminacy onto oil and canvas.
Among the lake paintings (all works 2026), several allow one tone – red, cool gray, acid yellow-green – to preside over the canvas. A horizontal line divides each, water below and sky above, a pale band of light marking the division, sometimes framed by dark tree trunks, sometimes broken by a jagged shore pushing in from one side. Though partially influenced by nineteenth-century landscapism, Nakamura sees the lake as a pictorial structure rather than a metaphorically rich or romanticized site. Landscape appeals to him as a subject because it can easily go unremarked yet carries the peacefulness of an ordinary experience. Suitably, gray tempers the paintings, lending them a common restraint. “Gray has become particularly important to me because it’s extremely responsive to the colors around it,” he says. “If you put a gray next to a green, the gray can suddenly appear slightly green.” Nakamura has recently been drawn to landscapes for their narrow, restrained tonal range. Restricting his own palette sharpens attention to distinctions in temperature and value that would otherwise dissolve in richer color.
Shota Nakamura earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Musashino Art University in 2011. His paintings have a soft, contemplative quality, blurring the boundaries between reality and imagination, featuring people engaged in quiet, restful activities – sleeping, reading, meditating – with gentle tones that create a sense of warmth and calmness. His compositions blend indoor and outdoor spaces into a seamless, introspective world, reflecting an emotional engagement with natural landscapes shaped by his upbringing in Japan and his current life in Berlin. Inspired by Bonnard, Vuillard, and Matisse, his work carries a painterly intimacy that emphasizes mood over realism, evoking a quiet, almost poetic stillness. The paintings reference photographs and memories taken by the artist himself, as well as images by other artists, and in some cases function as a critique of an existing work, directly quoting compositions while altering colors and elements.
Shota Nakamura (b. 1987, Yamanashi, Japan) lives and works in Berlin.
