Akira ISHIGURO

“When I paint marbles, I always see the same scenery.”

 

As I stand on a gentle slope of a little hill where grass has grown up to my knees, I feel the wind rising up from below. I imagine the trajectory of flowing dew, as it trickles slowly to the edges of leaves, along stems of plants, down to the ground, seeps into its surface, and dribbling through stratum after stratum until it finally reaches a stream of groundwater. 

 

Feeling the gravity from the trajectory of such a natural phenomenon, I have hitherto striven to capture the beauty of nature found in marble. While endeavouring to diligently delineate the line that condenses such wonder underpinned by the law of nature, I have recently produced a series of paintings, which I call, the Marblesque. Meanwhile, I have treated the Marblesque series rather like landscape paintings, albeit without applying the linear perspective. The following explains the rationale behind my intention.

 

In geology, according to the order in which the strata are formed, the present-day era fits in the era of Holocene, as some geologists argue. However, a theory has been developed recently, according to which the previous era came to an end and the world has now entered a new geological age. The name of the new geological age is called "Anthropocene", which was popularised in 2000 by the Dutch atmospheric chemist Paul Jozef Crutzen, who won the Nobel Prize for his contribution to the climate change research, in particular, on the study of ozone depletion. Since then, various theoretical avenues concerning the beginning of the new epoch have been proposed and intensely debated, although no consensus has so far been reached amongst scientists, and it still remains a contentious issue.

 

Mankind has produced and continue to produce debris that is non-biodegradable and thus does not return to nature, which has had a profound impact upon the planetary ecosystems of the earth. This has been defined as “technosphere". As humanity has inflicted colossal alterations to this planet, while halting the expansion of biodiversity, the new geological era of the "anthropocene has emerged. This is the idea that has recently caused much heated scientific as well as public debates particularly in relation to climate change. 

 

The beginning of the new epoch, the "Anthropocene", is said, by some, to have occurred in the middle of the 20th century, coinciding with the time that we, as members of society living in the present epoch, have walked the earth and precipitated the above-mentioned immense environmental footprints. Taking into account the explosive increase, the total mass of diverse technosphere is now said to be around 30 trillion tons, most of which, according to many scientists, will never return to the soil. Therefore, the technosphere will likely stay under the ground in much the same way as fossils, leaving an indelible mark that indicates a caesura from the previous era. The increasing fossils of our industrial civilization, namely ‘technofossils’, will remain as a permanent trace in the stratum and will do so well into the future.

 

The intensity of colours accentuated in my artwork, the Marblesque, is intended to evoke the quantity of heat that the technosphere emanates with the huge mass, as well as the future geological formation that will supposedly take shape in the future due to further environmental transformation. In my work, if we consider the GRAVITATIONAL FIELD paintings series as a geological formation of the Holocene and all previous geological epochs, then the Marblesque paintings series, which depicts the thermal metamorphism that occurs in the formation of the technosphere, is a geological formation of the Anthropocene that will fascinate geologists of the distant future. geologists of the distant future. the Painting of Marble paintings series is a pictorial expression that visualizes the transitional strata that connect them. 

 

Akira Ishiguro