hirofumi matsuzaki

On a white canvas there are coloful flowershaped spirals. The artworks of Hirofumi Matsuzaki are flat and they hang usually on a wall. They seem to be rather ornamental and abstract than real or spatial. But upon closer examination the paintings the artist calls modestly "Flowers in a white room" get somehow a deepness. Some of the paintings seem to have a stronger ability of creating this deepness, they have a kind of suction, a pull. Other paintings are rather decorative. All painting have in common that they are a elegant combination of luminescent colors, spirals, cables, flowers and "emptiness" or space.

The artworks of Hirofumi Matsuzaki build a synthesis of conceptual art and painting. They are not only just beautiful, but also a product of a long-term reflection about the boundaries of painting. However this is not obvious at a first glance: Understatement made in Japan. Since 2004, when he came first to Hannover then to Berlin. Matsuzaki went through a metamorphosis from a normal art student to a contemporary conceptual artist, who works with the means of paiting.

In the conversations I had with Matsuzaki I found out that he is also programming websites and is learing "acitionscript", a programming language for moving pictures. Even Matsuzaki, whose strenghts are the old media like canvas plus color (acrly or oil), is obviously part of the contemporary globalized information society. But not only that: Matsuzaki can use those new tools of the new media. Matsuzaki is a camouflaged media artist. As a masked media artist, who concentrates himself just on paintings, Matsuzaki is reflecting a enormously important element of our information society: The cable or the transmission line or to point it better out: The metaphorisation from one point to another, transmission itself.

The helixes or spirals have a suction. The have a pulling energy. The paiting becomes a object, a space. It forms a channel. On the same time this channel is the connection to the other side. The otherside of the wall? Or the otherside far away at the otherside of the globus? But not only the spirals and flowers seem to make a hint to our networked society, but also to the basic elements, that is to say the cables. The flowers look often as they where made with cables. Sometime they remind one of the spirlaformed hearer-cables of the old telephones, which were used until just some years ago. Transmission as a key concept of the globalisation is the essential subject of Matsuzaki's works, which are called "Flowers in a white room". Now he transforms his paintings into the dimension of time. He explores video art. "But just for fun" He would probably say.

The transmission happens self-acting. You get connected without any effort. Nowadays in the times of Web 2.0 the whole world is networked, cross linked, cross cabled, connected together. With skype - picture telephony - the people seem to come closer. It seems that the whole world is forced into one transmission line. Uniformed into one circuit. However Matsuzaki doesn't just criticize this fact, because this is almost like a common sense in the "avantgarde" now, he rather wants to think about the processes of transmission, of metaphorisation themself. The transmission is precisely not self-acting. It just seems that you get connected very easily. The transmission is a result of many many factors. Mediatechnology is working that well, that you dont recognize it. Mediatechnology is designed to be as smoothly working as possible. Media are like eyeglasses as Martin Heidegger noticed, they are invisible.

Matsuzaki for now doesn't want to show off or deconstruct the process of transmission itself - as for example Nam June Paik did - but he wants to show us the working process, the activity and labor of transmission. Matsuzaki is not just disobedient and critical. In contrast: He is participating, very obedient, very japanese to the whole process. He goes right into it and paints in tedious weeks-taking working processes using acrly on a painting a huge amount of works. He works like a slave. He paints what was a computergraphic before, but now in real. Matsuzaki is doing the re-transmission of the symbolic, non-materialistic cyberspace into the real materiality of the canvas. He is a medium and a machine. Not a evil machine, but a very friendly human digital-analog-converter, which is working with the factor X. In the 19th century this factor was called "genius".