Nensha

After exhaustive research in the field of Japanese story telling, a trip to Japan was planned for the artist, accompanied by a filming crew. The aim was to visit aledged magical, haunted and sacred places in search for inspiration and ardour. The chosen title of the show was "rite of passage", fitting for the phase the artist found himself in at the time. He was about to be a father for the second time and he finally felt that the years of searching for the source of his inspiration, he had found the earthly equivalent of his inner world in the shape of Japan, and thus felt as thought this next yet to be created body of work would be his coming of age, his trading in his childhood in exchange for long awaited maternity.
Arriving in Tokyo they found themselves in a fast-paced westernized metropolis and they sought their salvage in the foothills of Mount Fuji, where wondrous things have happened as Japanese tradition had learnt us. Not only did they find nothing of the sort, all guides and information points were highly sceptical and quite unwilling to cooperate when confronted with their wishes and requests.
Returning to his studio, the artist mechanically started reproducing all the sites that he had visited in the past 6 months.
As always, feaverishly sratching the surface of the paintings that at that point depicted a true, dry, grown-up and dull reproduction of the things he had seen, the artist was looking to find a way into the inbetween world, the world of the unborn, the deceased and the non-existing.
Instead, for the first time in his life, nothing happened.
Finding no entry into his own previously inexhaustuble source of inspiration, so much akin to that of the Japanese folklore, he saw no other option that to continue to litterally reprodce the sites he had visited and settle for painting Japanes scenery.
Mere days before the new works were to be shipped out from Amsterdam to Tokyo, the paintings started to change.
The artist had no choice but to sit and wait until the seemingly chemical process had run its course.

The result was neither of Japanese folklore, nor did it belong to the trusted inner world of the artist. It seemed to come from a whole other place all together.

Experts were brought in for thourough investigation, but the only term that could be given to the unstoppable, irreversable process was: NENSHA; The all but forgotten phenomena of phisically burning images from one's unconscious, often unwitting or even unwilling mind onto surfaces such as photographic film or paper.