To “capture the void,” “to seize the reverse side of the matter,” such are the stakes of the spectacular work of the Japanese artist Yasuaki Onishi, born in 1979 in Osaka, where he lives and works to reverse our vision of the world, to allow us to “look at it from a different point of view.”
Evoking, in turn, a frothy wave, a sea of clouds, and a mountain ridge, Yasuaki Onishi’s floating spaces transport us into a strange world, that of negative space, these empty, transitory spaces emerging at the edge of forms; space-time in suspense – invisible forms between forms, intervals between objects – at the origin of the concept of Ma, at the foundation of Japanese aesthetics that have made emptiness the cornerstone of all the arts.
“I am interested in invisible things, such as air, time, or gravity,” explains the champion of these “aerial spaces,” of which he applies himself to reveal the forms hidden in the “gap of time,” the virtual existence deployed in an invisible way around and between the objects… Thus, in his Penetrating Landscape, he managed to make the intangible tangible, to give form and consistency to the void with a minimalist sculpture of its random contours… In his Vertical Emptiness he implements an attempt to link two spaces (top and bottom) by vertical lines drawn in the void separating them, by means of a glue gun, from branches suspended from the ceiling… A wire network sometimes enhanced with fluorescent light (another immaterial material used by the artist) or a snowy powdering: in his Vertical Emptiness shown in 2013 at the Kyoto Art Center, it is a landscape of enchantment that composes the curtains of rain of white threads falling from a chandelier of branches, powdered with snow, to the ground composed by crystallization…
Watch videos of the artist‘s creative process: https://cocaproject.art/artists/yasuaki-onishi-coca21-2//
Yasuaki Onishi is represented in Paris by the Virginie Louvet Gallery
48, rue Chapon 75003
Stéphanie Dulout