Pacific Breeze 4

A palm-lined road runs straight toward a small cluster of city towers, while a pale blue vintage car glides along the coast and the ocean glitters off to the left. The whole scene feels frozen in the best part of a summer afternoon. This is the work of Hiroshi Nagai, a Japanese painter born in 1947 who built his reputation on dreamy visions of California and tropical getaways. His trademark tools are clean edges, flat blocks of color, and skies of an almost impossible blue, all adding up to a mood of easy, unhurried leisure. Many of the places he painted were imagined rather than seen firsthand.

Nagai's art is tightly bound to city pop, the breezy Japanese music genre that swept the late 1970s and 1980s. His paintings decorated countless album covers, and the name shared here with the Pacific Breeze compilation series shows how deeply his images and that sound belonged together. His secret is simple: he leaves out anything that could spoil the fun. No traffic jams, no crowds, no clouds. Instead of a real location, what he offers is a feeling, a warm daydream of open highways and the sense that nothing at all needs to happen today.