Yasuaki Onishi — Reverse of Volume — Virginie Louvet Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: May 16 → June 21, 2018

Yasuaki Onishi — Galerie Virginie Louvet La galerie Virginie Louvet propose une exposition radicale, confiant son espace à l’artiste japonais Yasuaki Onishi qui invente ent... 1 - Pas mal Critique

Yasuaki Onishi creates sculptures that make visible spaces normally perceived as hollow or blank, revolving around straightforward themes of volume, verticality and distance. Using materials that do not retain shapes easily — glue and polyethylene sheeting — and working with actions, phenomena and time as compositional elements, he applies a delicate sensibility to elaborate forms at the boundary between human agency and nature. Assuming shapes that seem to manifest before us as landscapes — vast mountains and glacier caves, seas whipped up by the wind or silhouetted nebulae — these molded forms occupy the space and envelop the viewer. The material turned into art pieces becomes substance, revealing things that cannot be seen and the space is transformed into a vessel filled with beauty, storing up the viewers’ boundless thoughts and imagination. Through Onishi’s sculptures, we catch glimpses of possible passageways to the reverse side of the world in which we live.

Reverse of Volume:

For his first solo show at the gallery, Yasuaki Onishi presents an installation created specifically for the space on Rue Chapon, which is an integral part of the Reverse of Volume series. That body of in situ works started in 2010 is itself an element of a broader project by the Japanese artist, titled Sculpting Emptiness, which while deviating from preexisting sculptural expression also examines its very essence.
For Reverse of Volume, polyethylene sheeting is spread over a pile of cardboard boxes, forming the outline of vague forms resembling mountain ridges. Heated glue is dripped directly over those from a glue gun, creating a large number of vertical lines that fill the upper part of the space, after which the cardboard boxes are removed in order to reveal the piece. On entering the empty interior, the viewer is bathed in soft variations of light and shadows created by the floating sheet, and experiences this new feeling of “seeing the reverse side of a sculpture”.

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Yasuaki Onishi was born in 1979 in Osaka, Japan. He lives and works in Osaka.