Writings
Andre Lipscombe on Rhizograph\Rhizogram (2024)
The paintings produced by Hiroshi have impressed me to reflect broadly upon human experience, history of painting and the role of the artist in connecting audiences with contemporary concerns about the present and future.
Hiroshi has prompted this thinking through his beautiful images that are a result of an interface between visual, computational, mechanical, and material languages.
So, what is the context to my thought processes?
Currently, computers are changing how our brains are evolving. Human brains are being altered without our knowledge or permission, traits like our memory centres are shrinking as we absolve more of our long-term and episodic memory tasks to our smart devices. Consequently, our capacity to have memories at all, is being eroded.
Another impact of computers on ourselves is the limits being placed on expression of free will, which is becoming algorithmically driven in ways we often can’t discern, and therefore can’t avoid. If the past few decades are anything to go by, where mind altering technologies are concerned, all of us will be affected.
Hiroshi fires my imagination to consider the infinite scope of working with computers to make art, creating mysterious schematic Fibonacci diagrams across immaculate coloured fields. These Rhizograph/Rizogram images are resultant of controlled experiments, a product of a blend of electronic traits and human decision making. For me, Hiroshi’s paintings are reminders of the speculative picturing that is emerging in science and art, which draw upon the growth of cosmological knowledge in understanding the infinite geometry of space and time. Hiroshi’s output is mediated through the camera lens, computer coding and make-do mechanics, which render 3D vector images (that can be plotted to almost any dimension with a machine big enough) through the aesthetic dimension of oil painting, rather than the reproduction processes of photography or printing.
His paintings embody a practice linked to a rich intellectual East/West tradition concerned with understanding the nature of ‘being’. That intellectual discourse is built up through the way he manages ‘translations’ of 3D images into 2D painting. For Hiroshi, existence/consciousness isn’t just ‘background’ noise to living or making, or a set of occasional dimensional references, but is infused and compressed literally into his painting process.
In preparation for this statement, Hiroshi and I discussed his new painting over coffee. We touched on his origins as a painter, his Japanese roots and among other things, the impact of American painter Frank Stella and his black paintings produced in the late 1970’s.
At the cusp of the digital age, Stella wanted to eliminate the personal reference (emotion) and symbolic meaning associated with modernist abstract painting. He criticised the work of earlier painters as too ‘relational’, a term Stella used to describe their subjective processing. Of course, art has evolved light years from the painterly idiosyncrasies of the 1970s. Hiroshi has devised a unique set of painting ‘relations’, developed by the artist using a repurposed plotter, pressurized air dispenser and a pipette paint dropper.
Hiroshi’s ‘relational’ code substitutes the human touch, with the repetitive strokes of a machine. He plots a schematic map, a Rhizograph, as he calls it, fabricated initially as minute dots of paint, which in a latter phase of mechanical production, are flattened and spread out across the painted field by the adroit brush of the machine. Painting with computers is common in the expanded field of contemporary painting, but Hiroshi’s innovation of his own production equipment, forms an essential part in his relations with oil painting and the evolution of the technological culture of our age. The relational outcomes are evidence of a causal consequence of his painting process, in which each tiny paint dot, among so many dots, are plotted and brushed out to the point of exhaustion, a fade out across the canvas, reading like a disclosure of something relating to the transience of human existence. Transient like everything else, perhaps.
Like Stella, Hiroshi’s solution to painting still engages directly with the subjectivity of the artist. While being transmuted through a computer file and painting machine, he still draws our attention to the unique presence of the physical and quintessential material forces inherent in the imperfections of painting.
Hiroshi writes in his catalogue a note about his painting of how unpredictive and seductive computers and alternative intelligences might be – while some may view these concepts as tools for deconstruction, I embrace them for their constructive potential. In my interpretation, the plane of painting transcends mere representation or production; it becomes an organization guided by its own inherent principles. Through plan(n)ing (flattening) the interconnection of multiplicities, I aim to embody each artwork with a singular essence more than visual forms.
Paradoxically Hiroshi doesn’t deny the illusionistic tradition of perspective in his paintings and has largely erased any sign of his emotional investment in the work. In adopting a creative process without the haptic relations used to make a painting (hand of the artist), Hiroshi formulates an image record of the machine’s work, while looking for moments of connection with humanity and nature within the soft edges of the painted marks.
It does one good to acknowledge and reflect upon all of nature’s ways; including the quantum tasks that may be at work in the primary processes of the universe and the capacity of humanity to inhabit opportunities the Anthropocene is yet to create.
In this context Hiroshi produces artworks of distillation and contemplation interpreting our ever-changing relationship with the human condition. For artists like Hiroshi, the answers to questions regarding existence and survival are found in the creative processes of thoughtful people working in harmony with technologies. Our future may not be fully pre-determined by computerisation and is still open to manipulation and change for the good.
Andre Lipscombe is an artist and curator of the City Art Collection at Fremantle Arts Centre. This essay is an excerpt from his opening speech for the exhibition Rhizograph\Rhizogram at Rockingham Arts Centre on 25 May 2024.
Plan(n)ing a painting (2024)
The exhibition title Rizograph\Rizogram came to mind as I began to play with words, connecting the name of Rockingham with my past exhibition titles: Patagraph\Patagram 2021 and Qualiagraph\Qualiagram 2022. Given the alphabetical sequence of P and Q, it seemed almost destined that the letter R from Rockingham would be next. This led me to consider a title that would evoke the sound of ‘R-gram.’ It was during this thought process that I recalled the philosophical concept of the Rhizome, initially introduced in the 1987 text ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ by the philosopher duo, Deleuze and Guattari. The Rhizome represents a network of multiplicities. It contrasts hierarchical tree-like structures prevalent in Western thought. In ‘A Thousand Plateaus,’ it is stated:
“There are no points or positions in a rhizome (…). There are only lines.”
“We have been calling this kind of graph (the graph regulating the circulation of information) a map.”
“There are rules of ‘plan(n)ing.'”
“An abstract machine (…); it is diagrammatic.”
As I reread the text, and reflecting it on my practice, I realize that I may have subconsciously drawn inspiration from these ideas. My recent exploration involves the creation of a self-assembled machine, designed to control the flow of oil paint with precision along parametrically aligned vectors on the canvas surface. This approach has led me to adopt the suffixes ‘graph’ and ‘gram’ in naming my practice.
While some may view these concepts as tools for deconstruction, I embrace them for their constructive potential. In my interpretation, the plane of painting transcends mere representation or composition of visual elements; it becomes an organization guided by its own inherent principles.
“The plane of composition is not a literal plane; but a decentered spatiotemporal ‘organization’ ” (Grosz, 2008, p.70).
Through interconnecting multiplicities onto a plane (planing/flattening), I aim to embody each artwork with a singular essence, more than just with visual forms.
“For example, very small children all resemble one another and have hardly any individuality, but they have singularities: a smile, a gesture, a funny face – not subjective qualities. Small children, through all their sufferings and weakness, are infused with an immanent life that is pure power and even bliss” (Deleuze, 2001, p.30).
On Patagraphy (2019)
Outside us, mutual externality without succession; within us, succession without mutual externality.1
When I saw the space at Heathcote Museum & Gallery, it inspired me to metaphorically create windows on the wall to let the light outside into the room inside through a series of paintings. Once created, it would symbolically resonate with my idea of the interaction between the mind’s internal consciousness and the external world; the outside borrows succession from the inside and the inside borrows distinction from the outside.2 This initial concept of interactive movement resulted in what I have termed Patagraphy.
The idea of Patagraphy first came to me in 2016 when I was looking down at Cottesloe Beach from the footpath. My mind’s focus oscillated between the vista and my body. As I felt the wind on my skin I started to reflect on a time long since passed; a time in 2011 and although the ripples of the waves in the distance seemed so small, I had a distinct tactile feeling of just how massive they really were. My thoughts strangely shifted to the idea of ‘entropy’ that I had often vaguely wondered about in my studio while working. I had a sudden sense of the entropy in the ocean. These ideas were chronologically different and geographically separate, and appeared in my mind, as the philosopher Henri Bergson would put it; as ‘a qualitative multiplicity’ and ‘an absolute heterogeneity of elements.’ Yet they still managed to be seamlessly unified and interpenetrate each other in my mind, just like Bergson’s concept of a ‘duration.’3 I took photographs of the seascape, but knew they would fail to properly capture this duration.
Photographic images have changed people’s collective sense of reality by means of mechanical reproduction and widespread distribution and thus, have now become innate to social media. There is a strong affinity between them and our visions, however, despite this popular society-wide penetration, the photograph is often too ‘flat’ to represent the unique personality of the subject; to quote Susan Sontag’s essay, ‘A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence,’4 and what is missing in it is the duration that is existentially unrepeatable.5
Back in my studio, I recalled the movement of the ocean and how that made me feel. I thought that same movement and the feeling it invoked in me, could be captured in an acrylic medium in a way that my photograph couldn’t. I wondered if I could capture this kind of entropic movement in my painting by making and using a camera like apparatus, so I started assembling a squeegee device, which smoothly slides on rails. When used, it mechanically spreads acrylic paint on a canvas with even pressure, but it is not perfect and records the imperfections of my hands-on operation, like a wave pattern. That was two years ago.
For this exhibition, I combined a cutting plotter with a pneumatic dispenser and connected a needle to the plotter head. I did this by making the required parts with a 3D printer. The cutting plotter, now repurposed into a new painting plotter marks out points for paint and dispenses halftone image dots onto the canvas. The resulting image is a continuous reflection of the calibrated movement of the device and the unpredictable way the needle makes physical contact with the support.
I thought I needed to coin a name for my new device starting with the letter ‘P’, since it was a consequence of the idea of combining Painting, Printing, Plotting, Photography and Photogrammetry. Thus the word Patagraphy was born; a compound word consisting of Alfred Jarry’s Pataphysics (the imagined realm additional to metaphysics) and -graph (an instrument for recording). Pata also means ‘canvas’ in Sanskrit, and ‘foot’ in Spanish, which reminds me of the continuity of dots resembling a patting rhythm and the accumulation of footprints during a walk. Taking into account the rhythmically similar sounds and Latin etymology of the words ‘pattern,’ ‘material,’ ‘patrix’ and ‘matrix,’ I hope the name Patagraph positively invokes a sense of fusion between these ideas.
I practice Patagraphy.
My artwork is a Patagraph.
I am a Patagrapher.
Hiroshi Kobayashi
- Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will. p.228 [1889]. Translation by F. L. Pogson (The Macmillan Company, 1913) ↩︎
- Ibid., p.109, p.228 ↩︎
- Ibid., p.229 ↩︎
- Susan Sontag, On Photography, p.12 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977) ↩︎
- Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, p.4 [1979] (Hill and Wang, 1981) ↩︎
Notes (2012-2018)
170102 12:38:36
THIIN GAS IS IN A PIT. 24 years ago in Brooklyn. I finally met a person* I had admired. It was 3 years before his death. It was also one of my purposes that I went to the graduate school in New York. I was fascinated with 50’s and 60’s American art rather than contemporary art in 90’s. He was a philosopher, poet and professor in Literature, and only once visited our studios. Since each student had just a couple of minutes to show their works, I made poems written on 9 canvases instead of paintings. He saw them, seemingly baffled and questioned me ‘What are you doing here?’. Then he picked up one poem and said ‘Is this Ku (emptiness)?’ I had never associated my work to Zen, but was pleased since that was my favorite one too. All 9 poems were anagrams of THIS IS A PAINTING, and I forgot other 8 ones. The best part of this poem must be THIN which is something I have been looking for since then through my work.
*Allen Ginsberg
130521 21:15:57
CORRECTICAL POLIT(E)NESS. Understanding and expression are two different things, and so are thinking about POLITICAL CORRECTNESS and engaging with politics. I noticed these nearly parallel layers embedded in our, so-called, ordinal life after I have experienced 3.11 earthquake and subsequent 3.12 FNPP accident in 2011 in Japan. In the catastrophic situation, the power reveals double-sided foundation that looks seamlessly unified on the surface of routine activities. Once the maneuver deployed, administrative decisions disguise as scientific facts, and intentionally confuse physical evidence and human emotion through manipulated information. The politics develops within a deeper psychological level like ‘inception’ of ideas, trying even to correct people’s politeness, and consequently change the social climate as they desired. But it is also an epistemological stratum that psychoanalysis and art could cope with, approach and affect, not directly but indirectly, and metaphorically.
121105 13:28:34
AURIC SLAM. Painting is not a pure fiction but also a SIMULACRUM. Painting is a fiction but has a substantial base structure that Simulacra have as Capitalistic ‘signes’. It goes beyond the space-time like language but is not anonymous; it has identity and specificity simultaneously. However, it is only recently that paintings, as objects, have entered a part of Simulacra. Rather, the inherent polysemy of painting was ‘auric slam’ to human intelligence and had precursed the simulacra.
171217 08:34:56
DAY REMADE. READYMADE must once disappear and reappear. Replica is a resurrection. The day must be remade, and there the delay is. It is an extension of paint layers into space and time, and has a closer generic structure with Fauvism and Cubism paintings than Simulationism. The retinal means one’s attitude that recognises everything as readymade without disappearance, and it is based partly upon the illusional faith (mirage) toward photographic documentation and its productivity. The delay comes out of the idea of immortality and mortality of things and bodies. The reminiscence of those thoughts and substances vacillate between past and future, but as a result, yet reside in the present. Forget about readymade. Think infra-thin.
180121 16:17:23
FELL EXIST VERIFY. When one objectifies even the theoretical demand that is “Be the SELF REFLEXIVITY a base structure of thought,” the time and process for making objects were problematized and foregrounded more than end-products. It was deducted out of paintings as objects, and developed from the idea of democratization. Then ‘the presentness’ in painting loosened in the sheer experience of space, and literally fell flat. But it still exists. Verify ‘durée’ in painting.
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