Juggling contradictions
Susumu Endo's digitally manipulated artworksThe digitally-altered photographs of Susumu Endo juggle innumerable contradictions. Perhaps the first surprise is that, after using the most cutting-edge computer technology, he chooses to print the final image via an offset lithographic process. This is partly due to practical considerations as, Endo feels, the colours this produces are far truer than anything which can be conjured on even the most advanced photo-printer. More important, however, is the psychological reassurance of knowing that the last stage of such an arriviste practice is grounded in a traditional printmaking process over 200 years old.
Endo has spent many years immersing himself in the minutiae of the printing method. One of his series from the 1980's consisted of images produced solely by superimposing layer upon layer of painted dots made from primary colours. He is in no doubt that this served as a vital training for his later use of lithography by giving him an intimate understanding of how the resulting print is formed. It is imperative that at no stage his photographs are reduced to an impersonal mechanical operation - 'the production of a black box' as he calls it. In fact the shortest stage in Endo's whole working process is sitting in front of the computer.
In his most recent print suite, ‘Space & Space’, each scene is created from a single photograph taken after a leisurely stroll through a wooded glade, usually in his native Japan. Before he begins any digital manipulation he has mapped out, in sketch form, several permutations of what the image could look like and only then does he select his final preference. Without sketching Endo feels he would produce nothing. “Younger people”, he says ruefully, “may be able to use computers to play with ideas but, because I am from an older generation, I still think in the form of a sketch” He does enthuse, however, about how technology has liberated the prints he can produce. “I feel that the computer was made just for me” he chuckles and recounts, with no little pride, that he is the only 66-years old he knows who goes anywhere near one, let alone uses the most up-to-date imaging software available.
Further contradictions are revealed as you delve deeper into his ‘Space & Space’ series. Wild, sprawling forest scenes are either penetrated by an alien geometry or bisected by abrupt chromatic shifts. The images play with a fine bal¬ance between unreality and reality. It is a symbiotic relationship in which order is imposed on the natural world, but the natural world refines geometric shapes as well. When this fragile duality is skewed too far one way, the creative tension unravels.
The way in which his prints fuse pulsating colours with a gentle oscillation between light and dark, positive and negative, gives an ethereal, spiritual feel to his work. Endo is at pains to dismiss any obvious link to a Zen theology but there is a meditative air which hints at another form of philosophical reverie He talks about searching for 'a sense of transparency' and 'an aesthetic of silence' which he senses in the films of the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky. Again there is the contrast, this time between rationalism and lyricism. But then juggling contradictions is what gives Susumu Endo's work its own special quality.
Pryle Behrman in Printmaking Today, summer 2000
www.susumu-endo.com
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