GALLERY MoMo

GALLERY MoMo Ryogoku is pleased to present OVER PAINTING, a solo exhibition by NAGASAWA Hideyuki, on view from February 21 to March 28, 2026.

 

OVER PAINTING is an attempt to reactivate, as a practice, the fundamental questions that the medium of painting has long carried within it—seeing, remembering, and bearing time. Taking as its point of departure an anonymous portrait photograph marked “Shooting in 1938,” Nagasawa has developed a series of paintings in which the acts of rendering and erasing an image are inextricably intertwined. As the figure simultaneously emerges and is obscured through the application of dotted pigment, the photograph’s referential function is destabilized. Yet the image is never fully erased; rather, it persists insistently in the depth of the pictorial field.

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This body of work was once forced into suspension amid the COVID-19 pandemic and a growing doubt concerning the very conditions of possibility of painting itself. After experiencing a period in which painting became impossible, Nagasawa returned in 2024 to a group of previously unpublished works and, through the act he terms “over painting,” reactivated them—not as remnants of the past, but as sites that contain multiple temporalities and bodily sensations. Over painting is neither correction nor completion. It is an operation that does not sever time but instead forces multiple times to collide upon the same plane.

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The exhibition presents a group of new works generated by layering fresh acts of drawing and painting onto studies and previously exhibited works produced since 2017. Through the repetitive process of drawing, erasing, covering, and drawing again, time accumulates within the painting and becomes visible as an irreversible record. The resulting surfaces appear less as finished images than as stratified layers of sedimented time, or as cross-sections of memory.

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The central concern running consistently through Nagasawa’s practice is that of “seeing.” At his 2006 exhibition Megamil (eyes see), he proposed the perspective, “It is not I who see, but the eye that sees,” suggesting a departure from a subject-centered model of vision. This idea—what Nagasawa has called the “cosmic retina,” a world seen through an eye not limited to the human retina—offers a way of understanding painting not as a representational device, but as the materialized trace of something that has been seen. The paintings in this exhibition likewise appear as two-dimensional objects that have arrived upon, and come to rest against, the vertical plane of the wall.

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In the 2017 exhibition Ghosts of the Future, the ghost was conceived not as a return of past memory, but as a “memory of the future yet to occur.” It was an unborn presence, and at the same time a figure of ourselves living in the present. In OVER PAINTING, too, new lines and colors layered over existing temporalities—old photographs and earlier paintings—cause time to emerge not as a linear progression, but as something tangled and overlapping. What appears are memories not yet verbalized, or memories still in the process of formation.

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The exhibition also includes works that take as their subject the 1944 sinking of the Tsushima Maru¹. For Nagasawa, painting is not a sanctuary protected by institutional frameworks, but something continually shaken within its tension with reality. Faced with ongoing wars and massacres, the powerlessness of painting is laid bare; yet what remains for the artist is to continue “seeing” the wars that occurred within one’s own history, and to persist in remembering them. The Tsushima Maru incident is thus recalled into the present as an ethical ground upon which painting itself is made possible.

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Formally, the series is characterized by the dismantling of images through dots and the recovery of the erotic materiality of paint. Existing images are first covered with pointillistic color and reduced to a “zero-dimensional” state. One-dimensional lines made with the handle of the brush then intervene, generating forms beyond two dimensions, before the brush is once again employed in the final stage, bringing the raw, corporeal materiality of paint to the fore. Rather than an orderly construction, this process opens the pictorial surface as a site of generation charged with collision and disorientation.

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While Nagasawa’s recent C-TRANSMISSION series explored experiences of seeing dreams and memories through monochrome drawings and prints, OVER PAINTING marks a return to a deep immersion in painting as a medium itself. Extending from Megamil, Membrane, Ghosts of the Future, and Painting on Painting, this exhibition employs the method of over painting to release painting from the notion of a completed image, redefining it instead as a site where time, memory, and the body collide. On these surfaces, painting no longer functions as a visual window, but emerges as a two-dimensional object that responds directly to the viewer’s body.

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¹ On August 22, 1944, during the final stages of the Pacific War, the Japanese merchant vessel Tsushima Maru, carrying schoolchildren evacuated from Okinawa to Kyushu, was torpedoed by a U.S. submarine off the coast of Akuseki Island in the Tokara Islands. The ship sank, resulting in the deaths of 1,484 people, including 784 schoolchildren.