Mineral
Mineral Series – Click Image for Details
This series depicts matter. Not matter that actually exists on Earth, however, but matter in an abstracted form.
Until now, I have painted light itself. In those works, the subject was a source that emitted its own light. What this series depicts is not a light source, but secondary light—light reflected off matter. Light acquires expression only when it touches the surface of matter. A wet surface glints sharply; a dry surface absorbs light; a coarse-grained surface scatters it finely. Differences in texture, the diversity of reflection. What appears there is an expression far more complex than that of the light source itself. I want to capture that moment.
What is depicted, however, is not any specific matter. Not rock, not ore, not water. It is matter that exists nowhere. And yet the matter within the picture has weight, has complex form, and shows movement. Cracking, corrosion, sedimentation, flow. The expression matter reveals over long stretches of time, and the expression light reveals for only an instant—the two meet within a single picture.
It is this expression, held by matter, that I wish to set down on the surface.
Abstract Matter
Water flowing underground, like a hidden vein of ore. Invisible from the surface—this is a picture that sees through the earth. Spray bursts against pale stone, sediment darkens below: the unseen current revealed for a single moment.
伏流水 Subterranean Stream
Water that sustains life. At Lourdes, in southwestern France, spring water is known as miraculous water that heals. This work expresses the energy such water holds: on weathered green ground, blue matter blooms from within, light seeping through it like a quiet pulse.
命の水 Water of Life
Water welling up from between rocks. Not the rock itself—but soft water seeping out of something hard, like solid bedrock. Cracked lime, faint stains of moss and gold: an unyielding surface, and the gentle emergence it cannot hold back.
湧水 Spring Water
Against a ground of earth tones—rust, umber, burnt stone—a vein of water flows. It follows the low places of the land, trickling downward through cracks like water finding its way. Two temperatures, two speeds of time, one surface.
水脈 Water Vein
Light arriving at a surface. It travels as a shaft through a field of fine particles, reaches the plane, and is reflected—scattered into countless points of grain. A vein not of water but of illumination, caught at the moment of touch.
光脈 Vein of Light
Water, or perhaps ice—something that has taken form is flowing. Horizontal streaks pull across the surface; light skims the current and darkens into depth. The form will soon collapse, dissolving back into the flow from which it came.
流水 Flowing Water
Life emerging within the sea. Pale light gathers at the center, faint textures layering like sediment—primordial life that does not yet know what form it will take. The deepest, darkest surface: matter before form, the series closing at its source.
原初の海 Primordial Sea