About the Work
On a sea's edge! The eye sharply separates the sea from the sky; the air stands above the uniformity of the waves. Sugimoto's eye does not seem to want to risk a blink of an eye behind the large-format camera, which is more than a hundred years old. From this morning until the brightening moon night he stared 24 hours a day at the surface of the water, as if it had slept, as he watched and aimed at the line of the intersection to the no longer visible. Over the seas of the world, the Japanese artist captures the stasis of time and light. The "ZENtric" Sugimoto wants to see what has never changed and for an unforeseeable time will still offer the same sight, while the memory of it disappears on the horizon. When the aperture is opened for different lengths, the sea (be it the Aegean, the Ionian or the Black Sea) appears as an eternally resting element under a pale sky. Sugimoto's black-and-white repertoire (wax figures, modern buildings, cinemas with empty canvases, historical costumes and reconstructed painting scenes), which is always sharply contoured and precise even in its blurring, is reduced to the minimalism of the straight line in the Seascapes. The gaze cannot reach further than infinity.
