AKIHITO NORO PAINTING PRE-PHENOMENALISM

I paint the interval between the moment just before an image is recognized as “something” and the moment when an image that has once taken shape begins to unravel again.

When I begin a work, I do not predetermine a specific motif or finished composition. I place, erase, cover, and layer colors and lines, responding physically to the forms that emerge on the surface. The layers of oil paint retain not only the act of painting, but also the time spent hesitating, pausing, concealing, and rediscovering. For me, painting does not reproduce an image that already exists. It is a site that holds the very process through which an image emerges, changes, and disappears.

Within a single picture, forms that resemble figures, landscapes, animals, or fragments of bodies coexist with forms that still resist being named. The viewer moves between them, discovers something, identifies it, and for a moment becomes convinced that they have “seen” it. Yet the image that seemed to have taken shape is destabilized once again by the colors and lines around it, shifting into another image or returning to a state in which it is not yet anything at all.

What concerns me is less the depicted object itself than the movement through which an object comes into being within perception. We do not receive the external world as it is; we see “something” by linking fragments of form and color with memory, language, and past experience. By producing recognition, naming, and certainty while simultaneously undoing them, painting reveals that seeing is not passive reception but an active process that continually generates images. This concern also connects with phenomenology, which asks how an object comes to be constituted as a phenomenon in consciousness.

I provisionally call this practice “Pre-Phenomenalism.” The term does not describe the painting of objects that have already stabilized as phenomena, but names an engagement with the intimation of an image before it takes shape and the residue left immediately after it loses meaning. Emergence and disappearance are not separate events. An image in the process of being born already contains the possibility of its extinction, while the memory and afterimage of an image that has unraveled become the conditions for the next image to appear.

In thinking through this cycle, I also draw on the Buddhist formulation “form is emptiness; emptiness is form.” This does not mean that I paint religious subjects. Rather, it supports an understanding of all forms as lacking fixed substance: they emerge through relations and change, unravel, and continue to pass into other forms.

What my paintings present is not a completed image, but a site in which an image occurs as an event. An image appears, is named, and almost simultaneously unravels and begins to become something else. At that moment, the work ceases to be merely an object of contemplation and becomes a field in which the viewer’s own perception begins to move.