Tuesday, 3 February 2015

Yasuaki Onishi: the ethereal Gothic.



Yasuaki Onishi is known for using 'humble materials' like plastic sheeting, dead branches, hot glue, cardboard boxes and urea, to create monumental installations that appears to float in space. The process, that the artist refers to as "casting the invisible", involves draping the plastic sheeting over stacked cardboard boxes, which are then later on removed to leave only their impressions. The process of 'reversing' the sculpture is the artist's meditation on the nature of the negative space, or void, left behind. In "White landscape" (illustrated above), the suspended branches and ropes are covered with dripping hot glue. This effect creates new shapes imbued with a faint luminosity. The dripping glue creates a vertical line using gravity and it's shape is maintained as the glue temperature cools down with urea. 'Urea' is an organic chemical compound, and is essentially the waste produced by the body after metabolizing protein. In the second image the artist used black hot glue to create intricate 'spatial drawings'.

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