For me,
Japanese woodcuts are a fascinating way of approaching landscape. Echoes of
this can therefore be found in many of my works, especially in this one.
They are
attempts to do justice to the blank white sheet as a prerequisite for something
to manifest itself. In the naked white of the paper, the pure potentiality of
the world shines through, which is given concreteness through the layer of
colour. Kasimir Malevic's ‘white horizon’ thematises precisely this difference
to a seemingly solidly given world of the ‘blue horizon’.
Water,
which has always been an important symbol of potentiality, appears in this
picture in at least three of its striking manifestations: as a calmly lying
lake in the upper part of the picture, solid, as a thick layer of colour; as a
gently flowing river below the footbridge; and as a waterfall plunging into the
depths, where the incomprehensible delicate spray reveals itself as the white
of potentiality. The detail of the implied reality in turn disappears upwards
and downwards into the open.
