hirofumi matsuzaki

On the white canvas, there is a curly cord, which connected the phone with the earpiece some years ago. These cords are unlike those phonecords painted in colorful red, pink, orange or skyblue. The cord seems to go out of the canvas forming a half elipsis and then goes right into the center of the image, but unfortunatly disappears at some point. The more the cord reaches the center part of the canvas the more it seems to draw the eye with more speed into a deeper place.

The artpiece is part of a serie which is called: "Blume im weissen Raum" (A flower in a white room.) Althought the painting is flat and hung on a wall, it gives you the impressing of looking into a deep well: Superdeep instead of superflat. The center of a well is evergoing blackness, however Matsuzaki's center is reduced to white. While darkness is associated with unease and anxiety, whiteness looks like pure light, which is associated with hope. Nevertheless it is uncertain where this light going. Some world of future? Asking the artist he says that you should get sucked into the otherside: The world of overthere, which is simply the otherside of the wall.

In the olden days 20th-century fine artist Lucio Fontana (1899-1968) had cut canvas with a knife and called the resulting artworks "Concetto Spaziale (spatial concept)". With these artworks Fontana tried to express aspects of space and time in a painting. Matsuzaki's Works let you remember those works of Fontana. Fontana fixed time and space by the instant cutting movement of the knife, but Matsuzaki's elaborated technique lets you go inside the canvas without any knife.

This simple optical illusion reflects also our contemporary situation. Nowadays we let us go, suck into something without any reflection. But this is not only negative but could also be positive. The result of our global travels could be a merit. In japanese you say: It brings you flowers. Therefore there is already a flower on this side, because on the otherside there is one too!

Questioning Matsuzaki why he got the idea of connecting the worlds of here and there, this side and the other side, he answers that it is easy here in Berlin: It is not difficult to try to connect both sides in a formerly divided metropolis like Berlin. The whiteness of his paintings also refer or match to the white cubes concept of most galleries. Asked again about the "connection", why he got that idea, he answers: "You get connected, without any effort! There is no other way than getting connected!"

Saying that there is no otherway than getting connected Matsuzaki is also doing some great efforts. He is trying to connecting his home city Fukuoka with Berlin by organizing a artist in residency programm called Studio Kura, which is a old rice storage house (a Kura). In September 2007 the first artist from Berlin Marcel Tasler will go there. Tarsler is a fellow artist in Matsuzakis Atelier called "Waschhaus", which was a washhouse before. Studio Kura is calling for participation at the exchange programm.