Artist Statement

"Natalia Nakazawa is concerned with living beings: humans, animals, plants, and the environment all come under her loving scrutiny, to be manifested again in glorious, detailed abstraction. She creates luminous intricate paintings that “seek to express the universal concepts of faith, love, and sexuality”... Nakazawa cites tapestries and textiles, as well as Bjork, Chris Ofili, and Aboriginal paintings, as important influences in her aesthetic vocabulary. Using a strong color palette and a labor-intensive process of layering materials onto canvas, Nakazawa produces paintings that are psychedelic yet contemporary, glimmering with hope and aspiration."

- Jaishri Abichandani, excerpt from Queens International 2006, Queens Biennial Vol. 3

"I have always thought of each one of my works as if they were the only work I would ever do: a total constellation of objects that had to suggest the idea they come from another place; as if they had been dug up from under the earth, from a forgotten place."

-Francesco Clemente

Painting the World of Visual Overload

I approach painting through my experiences in the psychic world of emotion, illusion, and imagination. Each image is placed in a seemingly illogical situation, and yet, like a dream, is transformed by the narrative of the mind. The hidden logic behind the barrage of imagery stems from my daily struggles to make sense of an overload of information. The resulting fragmentation mimics the process of collaging images together that are internal and external, spiritual and meaningless, bombastic and mundane. In this same manner we can walk down the street and see three blinking smoke stacks, next to a sparkling bay, next to a small slug on the ground. A connection is not obvious or meaningful without the eye of an artist to observe the situation closely and construct a new statement.

This statement does not need to hold judgment or moral conviction, but just to recombine visual elements to convey personal truth. Thousands of dots are layered over the surface of my canvasses to create a texture that embodies the complexity of life. The texture is meant to allow one’s eye to access the events occurring in the picture plane as if each canvas were a real, full-bodied being. What I record on the canvas is this visual tactility, the most provoking and sensate aspect of a living being. I maintain a fleshy and ‘alive’ quality through the use of juxtaposing bold colors and dimensional paint.

My artwork allows the real world of nonsense and absurdity to shine through the painted surface. The beauty in organized chaos is echoed in the very nature of dots of amorphous paint. The free flowing arrangements of images leave behind the need for hierarchies and sacredness. Each object is allowed the freedom of being disassociated from its original meaning and can then play in an unlikely narrative. The result is as close to my own experiences as the memories in my mind, and accurately depicts the essence of daily living.