Nicole Katsuras | The Unknowable Landscape
Nicole Katsuras | The Unknowable Landscape
Opening Reception: Thursday, November 5 | 5:30 - 7:30 PM | Artist in Attendance
November 5 - 30, 2026
Bau-Xi Gallery | Dufferin
1384 Dufferin Street, Toronto
This November, Bau-Xi Gallery | Dufferin presents The Unknowable Landscape. Drawing on the shifting rhythms of the natural world and the visual traditions of landscape painting, Katsuras creates atmospheric, textural works that exist between the remembered, the imagined and the unknown. Influenced by Japanese Ukiyo-e prints and the interplay of light, colour and form in J. M. W. Turner’s paintings, this new body of work explores the impermanence of nature and the ways art history shapes our perception of the landscape. Rather than depicting a specific place, Katsuras offers visual cues that invite viewers to draw on their own memories and experiences, allowing each landscape to take shape through personal experience.
Artist statement:
This new body of work considers landscape as a shared visual language - something understood almost instinctively, regardless of geography. Horizons, trees, skies and shifting terrains differ from place to place, yet the experience of orienting ourselves within them remains familiar: ground, horizon, distance, weather and light.
The viewer does not necessarily need to know where they are. The paintings offer visual cues rather than fixed locations - places without coordinates, hovering somewhere between the remembered, the imagined and the unknown.
The changing rhythms of the natural world run throughout the work. Influenced by Japanese Ukiyo-e prints and the aesthetic notion of impermanence, the paintings consider nature as something continually shifting, where beauty often lies in its fleeting moments. In “Harvest Tide”, a softly graduated ground and muted palette evoke the subtle transition between seasons. Sculptural passages of paint gather and disperse across the surface, suggesting organic forms caught between emergence and dissolution. The contrast between the quiet, atmospheric ground and tactile gestures reflects the tension between stillness and movement, permanence and change.
This sensitivity to nature's cycles extends to “Honey Bonani”, an ode to a friend's bee colony and the honey it produces. Delicate, blossom-like gestures drift across a pale ground, suggesting pollination, growth and renewal. The painting considers the vital, often unseen relationships that sustain the natural world and the interconnected cycles through which one season gives way to another.
Fragments of art history also surface throughout the work, raising the question: Do we ever approach landscape innocently? Centuries of landscape painting, Japanese woodblock prints, Romanticism, Impressionism, Modernism, photography, cinema and abstraction have shaped how we see and recognize the world around us. The atmospheric landscapes of English Romantic painter J. M. W. Turner, with his exploration of light, colour and dissolving forms, are particularly resonant. In Turner's work, light becomes more than an illuminating force; it can obscure, transform and even overwhelm the landscape itself, pushing recognizable forms toward abstraction.
In “After Sol”, a fluorescent horizon of fluorescent pink and orange recalls the heightened colour and atmospheric gradations of Utagawa Hiroshige's Plum Garden at Kameido, while also drawing on J. M. W. Turner's exploration of light and atmosphere. Like Turner's landscapes, where forms often dissolve into luminous fields of colour, “After Sol” considers light as a transformative force rather than simply a means of illumination. Sculptural gestures interrupt the electric horizon, creating a tension between the physicality of paint and the fleeting nature of light. The painting moves between historical reference and contemporary abstraction, suggesting an afterglow that feels both familiar and otherworldly.
Elsewhere, the landscape becomes increasingly ambiguous. In “Anywhere With You”, vibrant fragments of colour and texture gather against an expansive blue ground, suggesting forms suspended somewhere between the depths of the ocean and the vastness of the sky. The painting embraces the uncertainty of change, proposing that a sense of belonging need not be tied to a fixed location, but can exist within movement itself.
In “The Magpie and the Borrowed Sky”, sculptural fragments accumulate across a quiet, atmospheric ground, echoing the magpie's instinct to collect. The work reflects the continual gathering of images, memories and observations - fragments borrowed from our surroundings and reassembled into new visual experiences. As the landscape changes, so too does the way we see it.
Across these paintings, landscape becomes less a depiction of a particular place than a form of recognition, shaped by nature, memory and inherited visual traditions. A textured gesture across a field of colour might suggest a distant shoreline, a flowering branch or an unfamiliar terrain, although none has necessarily been painted.
In that moment, the viewer completes the landscape.
– Nicole Katsuras, 2026
