Marblesque 3 April 2025

Marblesque is a series of paintings that abstract geological time, using the cross-section of marble as a conceptual starting point, and is developed as a form of landscape painting without a vanishing point. By removing linear perspective and the subject’s viewpoint, the works present a “geological landscape” that remains after the collapse of anthropocentric perception.

While Abstract Expressionism inscribed the human psyche onto the pictorial surface, Marblesque aspires toward an abstraction generated by material and time themselves.

This series represents an attempt to expand abstract painting from “the human mind” to “the deep strata of the Earth,” positioning “anthropogenically metamorphosed marble” as a form of post-Anthropocene abstraction. Rather than depicting the Anthropocene itself, it seeks to align with the long duration of geological time and to reveal a vision of the Earth that emerges after the disappearance of a human-centered gaze.

Akira Ishiguro