Untitled by Tomoya Matsuzaki

Between the Fields explores the British landscape as a place shaped as much by memory and perception as by physical form, where land is not only seen, but felt. Carrying traces of time, absence, and a quiet, uncanny presence. This sensibility runs through much of British landscape painting of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Artists such as Thomas Gainsborough helped establish the genre, while J. M. W. Turner used light and atmosphere to dramatic effect. John Constable, by contrast, grounded his work in close observation of rural England.

Between the Fields is especially informed by Paul Nash, whose vision of the countryside as both real and dreamlike draws on the idea of genius loci, or spirit of place. His landscapes, marked by ruins, megaliths, and drifting mist, suggest a terrain layered with history and unseen forces, where the familiar becomes subtly strange and just out of reach.

Tomoya Matsuzaki’s paintings and drawings operate as both material objects and spatial constructs. Working on irregular hand-formed plaster slabs or torn pieces of paper, he layers conscious and subconscious gestures to produce unstable, shifting rhythms in which opposing forces coexist. Shaped by his experience of living in the UK, his work draws on the subdued tonalities of British painting, where landscape is understood less as a fixed view than as a sensation – muted, overcast, and quietly psychological.

As Matsuzaki himself reflects:

The world, illuminated by the light that reaches through the thin filter of clouds, is pale and faint…

Landscapes are a manifestation of one’s emotion. The landscape you are looking at is the place where you

now find yourself…