Air series

 

Throughout my career, I have worked on Kumohadamashi, a thick handmade Japanese paper, using natural mineral pigments.

In the winter of 2018, I traveled to the border region between Italy and Switzerland in search of snow-covered landscapes untouched by human presence. I was not interested in documenting what I saw; rather, I wanted simply to experience it while driving through the mountains. Seated behind the wheel, I moved my camera in various directions without looking through the viewfinder. When the negatives were developed, I realized that I had unknowingly produced photographic drawings of air itself—formed by fog, snow, movement, and the concentrated light of the sun diffused through mist.

The traces and trajectories that emerged from these images captured fleeting, untamed landscapes beyond human control or comprehension. They became the point of departure for a body of paintings developed in recent years.

This photographic work revisits those original images by pairing them with meticulously rendered paintings derived from them. By bringing the photograph and its painted counterpart together once again, the work proposes a meditation on the boundaries between painting and photography, the limits of representation, the status of images in contemporary culture, and humanity’s relationship to an increasingly unknowable future.

 

(Akira KUGIMACHI)