Tobias Bärtsch on Black Rain by Hana Usui
Day 1: As the grime of our lives continuously builds - oily, sticky thick - what do we make of it? What would someone else think when they saw it? Under thousands of layers, pressed together into a primordial mass of grey, are there healed scars or festering open wounds? The outer most layers are sometimes burnt or they get sliced open to draw something like blood which is black and leaves a foul stench. Sometimes we pick our scabs repeatedly; with time, they are not exactly healed, but perhaps continually overgrown, a palimpsest of marks and erasure. Layers stack and stack until we look at ourselves and heal for real for real for real this time…
Day 2: From further away, the grey color seems more like silver today. What looked like blistering burn wounds now looks almost organic, like a natural component of a complex texture, something akin to a coral reef perhaps. Bubbling wetness that is fluid yet firm, like a mercurial living machine, rapidly and unpredictably changing form. The silver shine of the portrait shaped object glows, worthy to be worshipped as a religious icon. Yes, it could be an alien monolith brought ashore from the undiscovered and vast void of the ocean.
Day 3: More imposing than ever today… Staring at the piece meditatively as if I tried to do a morning prayer: and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into bla bla bla...... And just as with the gods I am perpetually unsure if I should feel love or fear. Either way I am drawn to the piece as I feel a mysterious energy consuming me. I also have not finished my coffee yet and I am still slightly off-key. I pray to the alien gods: Please take me! I want to float in space.
Day 4: I zoomed in to closely see the toxins sweating down the silver slab: a tattoo that penetrates the bones, goes even deeper. A cancer that remains unnoticed and then morphs into spilled motor oil seeping through the generations, back to the dinosaurs, ink writing a sigil that swallows all light. Hardcore pain, unmitigated.
Black Rain, 2014, oil and ink on paper, burnt frame and acrylic glass, 45 x 35 cm