The precise lines and flawless composition incites a sense of enigma in Noriyuki Nakayama's Untitled (Lot 1125). The delicate yet sweeping brushstrokes are strongly rooted in the artist's training as a traditional Japanese painter. Executed with the technicality of his predecessors, the texture and contours of his beautiful protagonist and her surroundings balance each other in perfect harmony.
Observing Nakayama's work, the viewer finds him or herself mesmerized by the beauty, delicate details and incredible sense of aesthetics. Seated in her heavenly throne, lightly clad in an almost transparent night gown and playfully dipping her toes into the cloudy ice water, Nakayama's protagonist stands for both innocent beauty and sensuous femininity. The sprouting plants on both sides of her throne symbolize fertility, while the endless light-blue and carefree sky bestows upon her a divine spirit. Nakayama utilizes his traditional techniques to create tangibility in the woman's physique. Her simplistic and innocent portrayal highly resembles an animation, enhanced by the matte yet vivid characteristic that acrylic paint supplies. Unlike the works of his contemporaries, this animated quality is not forceful but gentle, possibly due to his conceptual technique of projecting a mental landscape of female figures, rather than an objective portrait.
In Untitled the artist seems to derive inspiration from his memories, thus generating a nostalgic aura. Nakayama oddly enthralls the viewer with this minimalist image by creating a profoundly serene setting. There is no explicit narrative conveyed by the artist, rather we as viewers are obliged to employ our imagination to re-create the story behind this painting, thereby delving into the memory banks of the artist.