Shota Nakamura’s paintings depict scenes that are both familiar and set at a remove, as if viewed through a dreamlike haze. Fruit, shells, a sailboat, and soft, rolling landscapes are among the subjects in Apple, chosen for their ordinariness and recurrence as motifs in art history. Eluding the narrative or symbolism often read into representational painting, the Berlin-based, Japanese artist approaches these motifs as vessels for formal exploration. “In recent years,” he explains, “what has particularly interested me is the tonality of light—the question of what kind of tone constructs a space.” In these works, Nakamura investigates the relationships between color, luminosity, and illusion by mining the effects of closely-valued hues.

Nakamura derives the seeds of his compositions from a variety of sources: the world around him, his own photographs, other artworks, movies, and his own memory. In the studio, he combines and recontextualizes these stimuli, which he calls “deeply personal, trans-temporal points across a vast visual pool,” sublimating their origins through his intuitive process. This approach posits representational art not as an empirical window onto the world but instead as an arena in which novel images are actively built, constructed architecturally from the interaction of color and form. The oneiric Landscape with Apples (all works 2026), for example, features a trio of fruits that dwarf the nearby trees. By rendering these larger-than-life apples in the same icy palette as their surroundings, Nakamura softens the surreality of this composite landscape-still life, instead emphasizing tonal value and markmaking—fluid passages of color contrast with dry-brushed, abbreviated strokes. Untitled presents a pair of mysterious, windowless buildings nestled in a clearing framed by velvety hills, as seen from an elevated distance. A semitransparent, rusty orange bleeds into the landscape from the bottom edge of the canvas like a light leak on a film strip. This veil of color adds a layer of mediation between the viewer and the vista; the near-abstraction of a triangular slice of river at the composition’s center also breaks the spell of direct representation. As the eye travels the canvas, the image flips between deep expanse and flat surface.

With its faint suggestion of space and subtle shifts in related hues, created through flickering, cascading brushstrokes, A Black Dog evinces the influence of Mark Rothko on Nakamura’s recent work. Unlike the Abstract Expressionist, however, Nakamura holds on to the figure, if only tenuously: like Zenzaburo Kojima and Morikazu Kumagai, modern Japanese painters who, in Nakamura’s words, “began with what was in front of them,” he pursues his painterly concerns through representation even as he plays with the conditions of visuality. Composed of feathery passes of oil, the creature at the center of A Black Dog nearly dissolves into the atmosphere, yet minute variations in hue register its presence. Slight differences in the luminosity of mauves and teals make the titular subjects of Untitled (Cloud) seem embedded into the sky at one moment and floating atop it the next. Gray, which Nakamura describes as “fragile, versatile, fluent,” is particularly important in his recent paintings for the hue’s ability to conjure a wide array of qualities of light. Streaked with blues and greens, the gray in Violin Player evokes the brightness of daylight as it streams through a wall of windows. The largest painting in the show and the sole interior, the work’s perspectival tilt toward the viewer invites them to step into the composition, only for the shallowness of its space—created through delicate fluctuations between tones in the ground and sky—to hinder passage. Working at the edge of monochrome, Nakamura carves out depth only to thwart it, affirming light and color as the building blocks of painterly architecture.