Travel, memory and drawing converge in Karel Nel’s latest body of work, where places visited become layered into new ways of seeing.

In Translucent Worlds, Karel Nel draws on a lifetime of travel, reading and observation. The exhibition gathers works shaped by journeys through Japan and Europe, encounters with artists and writers, and the accumulated memory of places that have stayed with him long after he left them.

Nel’s references move across time and geography. Bashō’s journey through northern Japan, Hokusai’s views of Mount Fuji and Hiroshige’s prints of the Tōkaidō road sit alongside Brancusi’s walk from Romania to Paris and Gauguin’s departure from Europe for Tahiti. Nel has followed some of these paths himself, visiting Brancusi’s studio in Paris, the temples of Kyoto and Nara, Uppsala University and the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm.

These experiences do not appear as straightforward records of travel. They are absorbed, reconsidered and reworked through drawing. For Nel, drawing is a way of thinking through what can be seen and what remains elusive. His finished works are highly controlled, yet shifts in perspective, vanishing points and overlapping visual structures keep them unsettled.

In Portrait of Per Wästberg, a library stands in for the Swedish writer and former chair of the Nobel Committee for Literature. Each coloured line becomes the spine of a book, turning the accumulated act of reading into a portrait of a life lived through language and ideas.

Other works began more physically, with rubbings taken from pavements and columns in Paris. These black-and-white surfaces became starting points for drawings that move between memories of Brancusi’s studio and forest shrines encountered in Uji and Kyoto. Places separated by continents begin to overlap, connected through texture, rhythm and recollection.

Nel returns repeatedly to the same sources, but never in quite the same way. A studio, a temple, a journey or an encounter may reappear years later, altered by everything that has happened in between. Translucent Worlds reflects this process of continual reconfiguration: memory layered over experience, and experience transformed through drawing.

Images courtesy of Karel Nel and Everard Read