Painting time

Though it opens officially in September, the new Riverbank Arts Centre in Newbridge, Co Kildare, is hosting its inaugural exhibition from today. It is a solo show of paintings by Makiko Nakamura, who has been based in Dublin's Fire Station Studios for the past two years. During that time, she exhibited with the Peppercanister and Ashford galleries, and it became apparent that she is an artist of remarkable quality.

Her grid-based paintings are highly distinctive in appearance, made by means of a long, incremental process, involving the application and erasure of black, silver and, on occasion, blue and red oil pigment, a process repeated "until I find out that there is nothing to erase on (them) any more". Their surfaces are burnished to a smooth glassy sheen and, as she observes, they are well nigh impossible to photograph. It would be like trying to photograph a mirror and, like mirrors, Nakamura's paintings are both absolutely flat and yet, in a sense, they open on to whole worlds within. They seem to embody the perpetual now of their making in quite a striking way.

They could be described as the residue of her working method, a residue characterised by a strange, compelling mixture of precision and vagueness. The grid is the pre-eminent organising principle of formalist painting, suggesting an impersonal order, but Nakamura's intentions are neither formalist nor impersonal. While the rigid order of a grid underlies each of her compositions, it is a grid endlessly made, erased and remade and, eventually, left alone: half there, half already gone. It suggests the inexorable divisions of clock and calendar, or the rhythm of a pulse.

The appearance of the organised but eroded, ghostly structure imparts a sense of a precarious present, "the present as evidence that I exist". It is a present projected by an accumulation of past days, a now that is the already fading accumulation of past nows, on the point of disappearing - "As soon as a square is painted, it becomes a past thing." Each work draws us in and imparts a sense of time, the time of its making, as definitely as Kawara's celebrated series of date paintings (which consist, of course, of the date on which they are made). Nakamura's paintings invite us to think of the history of a human being, of our own precarious histories, "the history of something existing here and now". They are very beautiful, quiet, and sombre.

Nakamura is tall and gracious. She lives and works in her meticulously organised, comfortable studio. One of her main items of furniture is a big blue sofa (blue, she once wrote, is a highly significant colour for her, "it has some tough meaning in my life"). She came to Ireland from the US, where she had been for a year and a half at the University of Pennsylvania, but her path here began with her decision to leave Japan about six years ago.

She grew up in Kyoto. Her grandfather started to teach her Japanese brush painting when she was four years old, and she eventually went on to study art, working for a time in film before establishing herself as a painter. By 1994, she was making extremely accomplished white grid paintings.

Perhaps these were influenced by her childhood memories of a favourite place: under a big cherry tree as "a snowstorm" of petals fell. "We were born in blackest black," her grandfather told her, "and sooner or later, everyone goes into whitest white, where there is no time." After the death of her mother, she felt that she wanted to start anew. The only practicable way to do this, she decided, was to place herself in an utterly strange environment. She had read Samuel Beckett and liked his writing. In her late teens, she had also read Jean Paul Sartre's Nausea, "a book that changed my life". So she settled on going to Paris. She arrived unable to speak French and gradually established herself, applying for and winning a place in a group artists' studio scheme. "It was," she recalls, "difficult to work in Paris." But it was also stimulating, "because everything was new". In one way she loved being there, but eventually the sheer weight of the city's historical identity bore down upon her too heavily. There was "too much of the past. I wanted to be calm, I wanted to concentrate on my work." As an art student, "I was influenced by the American abstract expressionists, by Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock." She resolved to visit New York to see the work of these artists at first hand. Through an academic she met in Paris, she applied for an artist's residency at the University of Pennsylvania. She worked there, and exhibited.

"But," she says, "I could not be comfortable there." She did like New York. "If I were young, I would want to stay in New York. It is an absolutely exciting town." Again, she decided on a leap into the unknown.

Again, Beckett prompted her, this time towards Ireland - Beckett, and a liking for Jonathan Swift. She applied for a place at the Fire Station Studios, and was accepted. Ireland seems to suit her as France and the US did not. "I'm very comfortable living here. I have made a lot of friends." So much so that she seems content to stay put. Besides her Riverbank show, she is exhibiting as one of Eight Artists Working in Ireland at Liverpool's View Two Gallery (until August 25th).

She is thoroughly at home working on a large scale. Big paintings suit the steady pace of her method, the way that her work is a cumulative record of time. More, she says, with a smile: "Work keeps me going, working all day, every day." Her work is formed by her experiences, but also, it must be said, by her individual qualities, her undoubted talent and her extraordinary resolve and concentration. Although, as she readily acknowledges, she was formatively influenced by French phenomenology, when I first saw her paintings it was a Zen idea that came immediately to mind, the idea of "being there now", when the gaps between ability, thought and action disappear.

And Nakamura is always there now in her work: "Painting a moment, erasing the moment and losing the moment."

Makiko Nakamura's recent paintings are at the Riverbank Arts Centre, Main Street, Newbridge, Co Kildare (045-433480) until September 1st