Press Release - As Cloud As Possible by Jean Nagai
Jean Nagai
Arrange for Harry
Acrylic, pumice, calcium hydroxide on canvas
60 x 50 inches
2026
As Cloud As Possible
a solo exhibition by
Jean Nagai
Opening Saturday, September 12th at 6pm
pt.2
1523b Webster St.
Oakland, CA 94612
pt.2 Gallery is pleased to present As Cloud As Possible, Jean Nagai’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Within the paintings, repeated marks, saturated color, and broad washes accumulate into dense, layered fields. Nagai’s work is rooted in questions of scale and interconnectedness, layering as a metaphor for time, multidimensional, multiple places as one, moving between the intimate and the vast to consider our place within a larger whole.
The exhibition title references As Loud As Possible, an album by Japanese noise duo Incapacitants. Nagai is drawn to noise music for its capacity to be harsh, chaotic, and cathartic at once. The shift from loud to cloud opens onto several associations within the paintings: clouds as accumulations of countless particles, as atmosphere, pollution, cover, and obscurity. Music also enters the work structurally. In Standing By A Mountain, four musical references correspond to the four elements, giving sound an underlying framework for the composition.
Nagai builds his paintings gradually, using pumice with acrylic to create granular, tactile surfaces and, in some works, incorporating calcium hydroxide, a mineral material that absorbs carbon dioxide as it cures. His familiar pointillist language remains present alongside washes of color and larger gestures, allowing the paintings to shift between intimate detail and expansive fields. Countless marks accumulate into larger structures, much like layers of sound gathering into rhythm, texture, and atmosphere.
Jean Nagai
Landers Bloom
Acrylic and pumice on canvas
30 x 40 inches
2026
$7,500
Inspired by pointillist Paul Signac, Nagai points to his painting In the Time of Harmony as reference point for this show. Signac portrayed a vision of an industrialized future in which mechanization might create greater freedom for leisure, creativity, and communal life. More than a century later, Nagai considers another technological threshold, shaped by robotics and automation. His interest in science fiction and mecha, the Japanese genre centered on robots, mechanized bodies, and the relationship between humans and machines, reflects a moment when ideas once imagined as speculative futures are becoming increasingly embedded in everyday life.
The growing density and vibrancy of the work also reflect Nagai’s experience of Los Angeles and his continued observation of how human, technological, and natural systems coexist. Nagai sees these forces as parts of the same larger environment, even as people often imagine themselves as separate from or in control of nature. Los Angeles offers a vivid macrocosm of that coexistence, with its layers of human activity, technology, landscape, culture, and history held together in a kind of chaotic harmony.
Across As Cloud As Possible, sound, technology, and landscape accumulate through innumerable marks and decisions. Distinct elements begin to operate as part of a larger whole and within that density, Nagai finds coherence through complexity.
About the Artist:
Jean Nagai (b. 1979, Seattle, WA) is a California-based artist. He received a BA from The Evergreen State College in 2004, and his work has been exhibited internationally, including in Asia and Sweden, as well as throughout the West Coast.