WORKS

Yoshitaka Nanjo's solo exhibition, "Mountain Peak," focuses on the changes in perception and mental state that occur when the body, standing at high altitude, confronts the landscape. The exhibition featured paintings created using soil collected on-site and acrylic paints, depicting the landscapes viewed from the summits of five of Japan's most representative high peaks: Mount Fuji, Mount Kita, Mount Okuhotaka, Mount Ainodake, and Mount Yarigatake.

The extremely open viewpoint of a mountaintop is not a position that dominates the landscape, but rather a place that strongly makes one aware of the insignificance of humanity. This way of being deeply overlaps with the sublime confrontation with nature, symbolized by the figures of people standing with their backs turned to nature depicted by Caspar David Friedrich. There, the landscape is not grasped as an object, but appears as a place that induces thought and introspection.

In Nanjo's work, the layers of drawings, constructed from photographs, represent the continuous flow of atmosphere and terrain that unfolds before the viewer's eye, while the soil directly fixed to the canvas functions as a substance that embodies the time and weight accumulated in that place. Views from high places are not merely visual distant landscapes, but rather landscapes that can only be acquired through the physical experience of climbing, and are points where the act of seeing itself is put to the test.

"The Summit" is an attempt to reconstruct the distance to the landscape through the body and materiality, rather than entrusting spirituality to symbolism, while drawing upon the Romantic view of landscape since Friedrich. The landscape that emerges there is both a reproduction of the external world and a space that turns back into the viewer's own inner world.