Where Is Everyone?

Built Environment: Minoru Nomata’s paintings ask why we obsess over unpeopled architecture

- Juliet Jacques

AT FIRST GLANCE, Japanese artist Minoru Nomata’s paintings look like photographs, so realistic are his portrayals of concrete and steel structures. The backgrounds betray them first: unnaturally dramatic clouds covering densely coloured skies that complement their imposing architectural foregrounds a little too perfectly. Strangely timeless and yet clearly modernist, Nomata’s uncanny buildings are not the utopian fantasies of Italian futurist Antonio Sant’Elia or Russian constructivist Vladimir Tatlin. While they are reminiscent of the international style, they are not typical of it: they would not have integrated readily within the architecture of the Soviet bloc, nor of North America at the height of the World’s Fairs, nor of Oscar Niemeyer’s Brazil. Nor do they quite evoke Nomata’s homeland, although the Japanese have a specific name – haikyo – for the type of abandoned infrastructure the artist so eerily depicts. Apocryphal if not impossible, Nomata’s buildings raise an important, harrowing question: where are the people?