Kosuke Nakane is an artist who blurs the boundaries between painting and sculpture with a decidedly playful precision. Although his works remain flat, they create a striking sense of spatial depth reminiscent of classical trompe-l’œil techniques, without ever adopting their strict illusionism. Instead, his images open up like small stages of color, pigment, and light. This spatial effect is further intensified by the way the works extend from the wall, casting unusually deep shadows. In Nakane’s practice, the shadow becomes a collaborator: it expands the image, shifts its contours, and compels viewers to constantly readjust their perception.
Thus, a nearly performative moment arises in the act of viewing. One moves around the work, tilts one’s head, changes distance, probes its dimensions—yet the impression remains subtly unstable. Nakane invites us to oscillate between seeing and recognizing, as if feeling along the edges of our perceptual habits.
His materials contribute significantly to this sensual ambiguity. Pigments derived from animal remains, minerals, and plants merge on delicate Japanese rice paper (washi) into vibrating surfaces, interwoven with the gentle shimmer of applied silver leaf.
The motifs themselves are playful and imaginative, shifting between suggestions of game boards, digital renderings, or amorphous amusement parks without ever becoming concrete. At the same time, traditional Japanese patterns or constellations from garden architecture seem to flicker into view—like fragments of memory that appear briefly only to dissolve again. It is within this tension between suggestion and openness that Nakane’s works unfold their true power: a state of suspension in which the image becomes simultaneously object, surface, and imaginary space.