What is “painted” in this work is a sky of blue-green and rows of standing trees. However, the entire frame is shrouded in a deep fog and all that can truly be confirmed are a series of leafless branches near the center. The term “paint” may be inappropriate for most photographic works of art. However, when one considers Tanno’s practice of using photographed landscapes as raw materials which he can combine and edit, the resulting artwork can only be described as having been “painted” by the artist’s hand.
Though Tanno couples these production methods with inward elements, one could also say that the artwork is an attempt to break free of the confines of the individual psychic landscape and approach a terrain that is deeper and more primordial. There is also the sense that such terrain exists in close proximity to the Japanese aesthetic concept of wabi-sabi.
The landscape that sits before our eyes is one of stillness and desolation. However, that state has been crystallized by the integration of Tanno’s careful and expansive interventions, and one cannot help but feel the traces that remain of his spirit.
Encased in hushed silence but never losing their beauty, Tanno’s works hold the potential of arriving at the Japanese ideal of yugen, the aesthetic of the delicately beautiful and subtly profound.
Silence, gloomy, the world before the story was born. 1
2022
h728×w1030mm
Acrylic face mounting on Giclee Print
“A world of thoughts and memories drifting at the base of the heart… With photographic field work impossible as a consequence of the pandemic, my practice shifted from the outer world to a new form of ‘landscape’, one that sought to capture the concepts populating the inner world of the self. The silent, gloomy realm of the brain is the world before the story was born, or perhaps the world after its end, a pure expanse where no characters exist. Regardless of whether it is hope or ruin that lies beyond the horizon, I am left with the sense that photography will continue to undergo transformation in both its form and purpose.”
07/11/2022(mon) - 22/11/2022(tue)
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