Patrick Nagatani: Chromatherapy

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Penhall notes though, that the works begun in 1978 would “take on a new and very personal dimension for him years later.”13 The artist has talked frankly about his battle with cancer. Some of the photographs in Chromatherapy hint at the cold objectivity and the invasive nature of western medicine. See for example ESOTERIC SCIENCE - SANDIA NATIONAL LABORATORY, NEW MEXICO 200414, POST ORTHOPEDIC SURGERY CHROMO REHABILITATION 2004, or his startling self-portrait, RYOICHI AND SID - ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO 2005. The presence, even in these images, of the enveloping color, however, softens them. Critic Theresa Bembnister writes, “The hue-saturated medical environments provide a stark contrast to the white coats and walls of hospitals and clinics.”15

LORNA - CHROMO COSMETICS - WEST HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA 1978/2004 (Chromatherapy series), 10 X 18, Chromogenic print (Ilfoflex 2000)

and the inability of language to express what is seen: “The idea that colour is beyond, beneath or in some other way at the limit of language has been expressed in a number of ways by a number of writers.”8 Nagatani’s images also deny language, or at least act as a different kind of language. In TRANSMISSION 1980/2004 a bloated hand floats in a spectrum of colored lights. Sign language charts float in the center of the image. Once again, the image cannot be read in any logical narrative manner, yet the component parts suggest alternative modes of making meaning. A parallel can be drawn, once again, to Spielberg’s film. At the climax of the film, two worlds communicate – the world of the scientists’ laboratory at the top of Devil’s Tower and the world of the alien mother-ship. Without language, color becomes the alternate code in which to express ideas. The colored lights and sounds, made by the space ship and its inhabitants, are translated into patterns and meaning, and eventually transport the main character to a different world. In a third part of his thesis Batchelor argues that color is suspect, in part, because it is “relegated to the realm of the superficial, the supplementary, the inessential or the cosmetic.”9 To Plato, the painter was but a dyer, producing a “deceitful kosmètikè,” a superficial cosmetic layer atop 8 Batchelor, 81 9 Batchelor, 22-23

a surface – a layer not really there, a layer unable to penetrate in a meaningful way.10 This cosmetic superficiality, nevertheless, could be seductive and dangerous rhetoric. To Babbitt’s and to Dinshah’s critics, this superficiality might lure the naïve and desperate patient with false hopes. Nagatani’s photographs recognize this aspect of cosmetic superficiality (one image is titled LORNA – CHROMO COSMETICS – WEST HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA 1978/2004) and he has called his images “charades.”11 Yet, an aspect of color theory resonates deeply in Nagatani’s work. “The substance’s placed within the colored lenses, and charged by sunlight become medicated with an exquisite principle which is more gentle, enduring and far reaching in its effect than ordinary drugs” wrote Babbitt.12 The use of the word “gentle” is germane to Nagatani’s practice.

13 Penhall, 146 14 This image certainly relates to Nagatani’s long-standing interest in the nuclear history of his adopted state. 15 Bembnister, “If I were a Chromatherapist…,” Kansas City Star, January 25, 2007.

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n the preface to Babbitt’s text, one 19th-century contemporary noted the need for a new type of therapeutics “light, air, water…food and food-medicines, in place of crude drugs, blisterings, burnings, setons, relics of barbarism.”16 Nagatani, reflecting on his imaginary images, writes “The idea of colored light as a non-invasive medical treatment, light over the body rather than the cutting into the body or the ingestion of drugs within the body might be a dream rather than reality, but perhaps some dreams should be reality.”17 Nagatani believed that he had completed his series in 2007. Yet in 2014 he returned to Chromatherapy, making an image of “the way you wish it would be”18 In CHEMO/CHROMO – RYOICHI AT HOA (HEMATOLOGY/ONCOLOGY ASSOCIATES, ALBUQUERQUE, NM 2014-15 the artist turns the table and takes control, and the chemotherapy setting is augmented by joyful chromohealing, lovingly delivered by three young and beautiful nurses who administer a red colored light. CHEMO/CHROMO – RYOICHI AT HOA (HEMATOLOGY/ONCOLOGY ASSOCIATES, ALBUQUERQUE, NM 2014/15 (Chromatherapy Series), 10 X 18, Chromogenic print (Ilfoflex 2000)

16 Babbitt, viii 17 Nagatani, website, http://www.patricknagatani.com/ 18 Personal communication, March 2015

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hile we might question the promises of alternative medical forms, we don’t question that light, and its component parts of color, are crucial to our survival. The transformation that we feel sitting beneath the stained glass windows of St. Chapelle or Chartres, is real, even if we have the inability to quantify that transformation with precise or scientific accuracy or with words. Nagatani tells us that art -- art that allows us to dream, art that allows for fiction, art that takes us to transcendent places through color -- is likewise essential.

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t stands to reason that a series ranging in date from 1978 to 2015 would reflect different concerns. A group of images focused on plant and animal subjects, for example, reflect bioethical debates on transgenic bioengineering that became prominent in artistic discourse at the turn of the 21st century.

10 Jacqueline Lichtenstein, The Eloquence of Color: Rhetoric and Painting in the French Classical Age, (Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford, University of California Press, 1993),42 11 Penhall, 146 12 Babbitt, 95

CRITIC & ARTIST RESIDENCY SERIES

POST ORTHOPEDIC SURGERY CHROMO REHABILITATION 2004 (Chromatherapy Series), 10 X 18, Chromogenic print (Ilfoflex 2000)

Acknowledgements: The Gregory Allicar Museum of Art is very grateful to the artist, Patrick Nagatani, for his kindness. The exhibition of Nagatani’s work and this publication are presented as part of the museum’s ongoing Critic and Artist Residency Series, supported by the FUNd Endowment at CSU.

Cover Image: MARCUS - INSTANT CULTURAL VISION - CHROMATIC OPTOMETRY LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 1978/2004 (Chromatherapy series), 10 X 18, Chromogenic print (Ilfoflex 2000)

PATRICK NAGATANI CHROMATHERAPY SEPT 10 - DEC 16, 2016


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