Naoto Nakagawa’s early work investigated the nature of things, the psychological baggage that we so willingly let our common household items carry. This led to years of contrived still life paintings full of socio-sexual, art & culture references that later developed into nature paintings, the environment that holds our things. Since the 90s, the titles of each of the series of nature paintings - Song of the Earth , Forest of Eden , and most recently, Earth Wave - exhibit the artists move through various examinations of how the big thing, life and death, inextricably feed off each other.

In the Earth Wave paintings, the artist has added a compositional device, transparent concentric rectangles - frames, portals, layers, time lapses, geometry: man made things - that disrupt yet also concentrate his images of the natural world. And while the palette is pumped up, it is also limited and used as a way to graduate and spatially define the territory of each the concentric rectangles. Layering and intersecting the representation of flowers and foliage, they create a push and pull, if not a pulsing, that leads us into the central focus of the painting, the center of a flower which in its representation moves swiftly from vegetation to gender to the erotic core that is life and death.