He’s a Rainbow
“Light is my medium to be investigated,” says the Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto, who spent years chasing bands of prismatic color around his studio in Tokyo and capturing them, with what was for him rapid-fire succession, using a Polaroid camera. In collaboration with Hermès, 20 of the artist’s abstract color studies have been translated into silk scarves in signed, limited editions of seven each. “Couleurs de L’Ombre” (Colors of Shadow), as the collection is called, is a moving tribute to the lowly Polaroid, which faces imminent extinction. (Sugimoto in fact exhausted his last batch of the film to make the images.) Hermès, on the other hand, developed new inkjet technology in order to faithfully recreate the subtle gradations of intense color. Where the original Polaroids are small and precious, the scarves are large — just over 55 inches square — and dynamic, playing with light in ways the artist had never anticipated. Though at around $10,000, you might think twice about actually wearing one. “It’s serious art for me,” Sugimoto says, with a nod to Hermès. “And if it’s serious art, for me, it’s also very reasonably priced.” Available at hermes-editeur.com.
By: Alix Browne
Photograph: Matthew Carasella
(there’s also a video of Sugimoto talking about color at the source)
