17世紀後半〜18世紀にイギリスやフランスの上流階級で流行したGrand Tourでは、イタリアの田園風景を理想郷（Arcadia）とし、そのアルカディア的風景画をお土産として持ち帰る若者が数多く、その風景画はイギリス庭園の造形に影響を及ぼし、ロマン主義的感性の芽にもなりました。

このように理想郷として描かれた風景は実際の風景にも影響を与え、平面から三次元や思想にまで広がります。「アルカディア的風景」が理想と現実の間を行ったり来たりする中で私たちは暮らしのあり方をより良い方向へと押し進めてきましたが、その狭間からこぼれ落ちたノイズは見過ごされ、今日の世界を巡る様々な課題へと変容していったように思います。

 

私の2024年までの制作では自身の存在の知覚を絵画空間に描くために、余分な要素を省くため、集めてきたモチーフを卓上に構成し箱庭的な絵画を制作してきました。

しかし、メルロ＝ポンティが「世界とは、私が触れるよりも早く私に触れてくるものだ」と述べたように、存在は常に自己完結的ではなく、外部からの作用に開かれた可変的な現れとして立ち上がります。主体と客体は常に影響を与えあい、立場を入れ替えながら存在している。そのあいだに生じる「ノイズ」こそが、存在を形づける不可欠な要素なのではないかと考え、制作のモチーフを匿名性のある箱庭的イメージから、土着的なノイズを含む風景へと移行しました。

この移行の足掛かりとして、まずは私が生まれ育った家の裏手に流れている川(鴨川の下流)の川辺を観察しました。そして今回の展示では、今までは邪魔で描いてこなかった石に覆い被さる枯れ草や植物を絵画空間に取り込み、川辺に流れ着いた人工物に、そのすぐ近くに生えていた植物のドローイングをサイアノタイプで焼き付けた写真作品を展示しています。

 

今まで自分にとってノイズだったものたちを作品に取り入れることで、風景が持つ複数の時間軸の階層を表現できないかと模索しています。

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During the Grand Tour, which became popular among the British and French upper classes in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, many young travelers regarded the Italian countryside as an Arcadian ideal and brought home paintings depicting such landscapes as souvenirs. These Arcadian images went on to influence the design of English landscape gardens and contributed to the emergence of Romantic sensibilities.

In this way, landscapes represented as utopias have not only reflected reality but have also shaped it, extending their influence from two-dimensional images into three-dimensional space and systems of thought. As “Arcadian landscapes” have continually moved back and forth between ideal and reality, they have helped guide society toward new visions of how life might be lived. Yet the noise that fell between these two poles was often overlooked, eventually transforming into many of the complex issues that surround our world today.

Until 2024, my practice focused on depicting the perception of my own existence within pictorial space. To eliminate extraneous elements, I arranged collected objects on a tabletop and created miniature, garden-like compositions that functioned as self-contained worlds.

However, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote, “The world is what touches me before I touch it.” Existence is never entirely self-contained; rather, it emerges as a mutable phenomenon, always open to influences from outside itself. Subject and object continuously affect one another, exchanging positions as they coexist. I began to consider whether the “noise” generated within these interactions might in fact be an indispensable element in the formation of existence itself. This led me to shift the focus of my work from anonymous, miniature-world imagery toward landscapes embedded with local and contingent forms of noise.

As a starting point for this transition, I observed the riverside of the river flowing behind the house where I was born and raised—the lower reaches of the Kamo River. In this exhibition, I incorporate into my paintings the withered grasses and plants draped over stones, elements I had previously regarded as distractions and therefore excluded from my compositions. Alongside these paintings, I present photographic works in which drawings of plants found growing near pieces of debris washed ashore are printed onto the photographs through the cyanotype process.

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By incorporating elements that I once regarded as noise, I attempt to reveal the multiple temporal layers that coexist within a landscape.