NYCoo Gallery Premiere Exhibition

Manuela Filiaci and Hitoshi Nakazato

The NYCoo Gallery at its new location is pleased to announce an exhibition with works by two artists, Manuela Filiaci and Hitoshi Nakazato. Both long-time New York-based artists came to the U.S. from different parts of the world in their twenties. What is evident in this exhibition are the dramatic differences in their explorations of the outer limits of expression, unexpectedly executed individualistic manners, and unavoidable references to the artists' respective traditional cultural aesthetics. With this exhibition the NYCoo Gallery celebrates its reopening at its new location and extends an invitation to you.

Manuela Filiaci, Italian-born artist, works with multi-faceted processes and materials, although she defines herself primarily as a painter. Her two and three dimensional works are filled with both poetry and paradox. Art Critic Carlo Mc Cormick writes: "I tried in vain to understand the parameters and anatomy of Manuela Filiaci's painting until finally realizing that the solution was not an answer but the acceptance of those possibilities that lies beyond comprehension and conclusion. Somewhere between pictograph, word annotations and diagrams, these works are at once plans recollections, fractals of fact and fantasy, whose invisible symmetry is an unfinished symphony of ever shifting focus and dissolve."

Hitoshi Nakazato, born in Tokyo, exclusively works two dimensionally. His two large-size horizontal paintings are from his “Line Outside Series,” a part of a larger body of works consisting of over 1500 begun in 2001. This series is an homage to Sengai, a Zen priest (1750 − 1835), known for his calligraphic work of a circle, a triangle and a square, executed almost a hundred years before the European Modernists began to explore the same concepts. The vocabulary has become cliche in Modernism and his insistent usage is deliberately ironic. “Line Outside” is a homonym for "Sengai" in Japanese. And in the series he explores the possibilities that lie outside the accepted norm and provide a line that leads into a realm beyond.