Syunsaku Hishikari~Collages~at I'Usine Galerie

Wednesday, 28 June 2006 13:14

Brussels, Belgium - Syunsaku Hishikari has a long record of three-dimensional works as an established artist.  However, he has been working recently on newspaper collage works by using newspaper clippings to reconstruct old family photos in his own, particular way.  His main theme is the group portrait of people, caught on the occasion of a party, a meeting or on vacation.  The faces, which he is creating, are unrecognizable.  Just if they had been exposed too long.  So these images become anonymous and the spectator can project his own memories and live into these images.  The viewers could identify the people in his works as their own family members, relatives or friends.  So Hishikari’s images seem to come to us as part of our own history.

The letters shining through the paper from the backside of the pieces of newspapers give us a subtle irritation.  Old newspapers are a known synonym for the transience of events and their own worthlessness.  Portrait photos, however, are sediments of time sequences, which had been taken to keep the memories of personal life.  Time seems to stand still in these pictures.  With his work Syunsaku Hishikari links photos, which had been made to remember and to conserve personal time, with the proverbial transitoriness of yesterday papers.  Besides his portrait-collages Hishikari also creates two-dimensional works from clippings of photos from newspapers and magazine articles and he puts them together as unique books.

“From time to time an invisible painter came to add a small quantity of color to the grey behind my pupils. Sometimes it was a grey with a touch of gold or a grey toned in green or red. I was admiring totally the quantity of tones of grey existing on this world. It’s strange, the human condition, I thought: It is enough to rest without moving for ten minutes to be able to look at an incredible variety of greys.” . . . (Haruki Murakami:.The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle).