Space&Space Nature 0603

Nature 0603 follows Endo's serial practice of cataloguing his Space&Space works by numerical identifier rather than descriptive title, allowing each impression to be read first as a formal proposition and second as a depiction. The print belongs to the Nature subset of the series, in which photographic motifs drawn from the natural world — leaves, grass, trees, water, stone — are juxtaposed with rectilinear architectural or abstract panels. Endo's working method involves photographing his subject, separating the image into colour plates, and printing through a combination of mokuhanga, offset lithography and screen — a hybrid he was among the first in Japan to develop in the 1980s. The result is an image that retains the tonal subtlety of a photograph but the matte, paper-embedded surface of a traditional woodblock impression on [washi](/glossary/washi). As with the wider Space&Space corpus, 0603 stages a dialogue between the contingent forms of nature and the orthogonal grid of the printed sheet, a meditation on the boundary between found image and constructed space.