Space&Space Nature 99B

Nature 99B is among the earlier-lettered prints in Endo's 1999 Space&Space sequence and shares the formal scheme of its siblings: a photographically derived passage of nature — trees, grass, foliage or water — placed in confrontation with a rectilinear plane of solid colour or printed pattern. The two zones occupy the sheet in carefully calibrated proportion, and the seam between them functions as the conceptual subject of the work. Endo prints through a hybrid method, layering offset photo-plates with woodblock impressions on washi, so the photographic areas retain the fine gradation of camera-based imagery while the abstract field reads as a continuous, opaque, baren-applied colour. The 99B designation marks it as a variant within an ongoing serial inquiry rather than a unique composition. Within Endo's career — which began in lithographs of pencils and eggs in 1979 and moved through pioneering digital and offset experimentation in the 1980s — the late-1990s Space&Space prints represent the consolidated form of his project, where photographic observation and printed abstraction are held in equal weight.