NEW YORK, NY.- The word for “moving” in Greek is “metaphora.” During three days, 20 U-Haul moving trucks will occupy West 22nd Street in Chelsea: a metaphor in action!
For its first participation in the fair, Bienvenu Steinberg & C will present The Dog Run, the first U.S. solo presentation by Japanese artist Nobuhira Narumi. Narumi’s paintings begin with a simple question: what happens to the visible world when the human point of view is no longer its measure? The Dog Run starts with a passage toward a zone where the distinctions between body and environment, figure and ground, seeing and sensing begin to loosen.
Drawing on his experiences with dogs and their owners across different countries and environments, Narumi turns familiar scenes into shifting fields of proximity, scent, memory, and attention. The painter becomes animal not by mimicking the dog, but by entering into an arrangement of forces: a lowered body, a changed rhythm, a different distribution of what matters. The room, no longer organized around the human gaze, becomes a multiplicity of paths, residues, intensities, and encounters: a brick wall, the arm of a kimono, a ceramic bowl full of kibble, diffracted light at night, or a spoiled apple are the new center of this universe.
Dogs inhabit our homes, streets, parks, and landscapes at another level and through a different color spectrum. Narumi uses photographs and found images to create paintings from lowered viewpoints, unexpected cropping, partial obscurity, and the delicate accumulation of painted dots. Scent introduces another geography: invisible traces converge, linger, disperse, and connect what appears unrelated to the eye. The same environment is now a set of overlapping worlds, each composed according to its own thresholds of proximity and attention.
In Narumi’s paintings, figures and surroundings are never entirely separate. Forms dissolve into their settings, while incidental details acquire unexpected weight. The dots can gather around a form or disperse across the surface, suggesting concentration, movement, residue, or disappearance. The dots do not simply describe an object; they register a relation, a pressure, a momentary becoming. Each mark records a moment of action, and their accumulation builds images that remain recognizable while softly displacing their original logic. Dense passages compress time; dispersed marks allow it to expand. Recognition remains provisional, suspended between what is seen, sensed, and remembered. The eye is trained to slowly tune in and pay close attention. Narumi’s paintings exude the quiet poetry and intimacy that emerges when one is deeply affected by another mode of inhabiting reality.
