The Shadow and the Trace

The protean work of Shinji Ohmaki is immediately characterized by a mysterious form of ambiguity: the need for purity is always juxtaposed with deep anxiety, to the disembodied and eternal poetry of his pieces is added an awareness of the current and contemporary issues. This ambiguity characterizes the double set of pieces presented successively at Mind Set Art Center - Tectonics in 2015 and Gravity and Grace in 2017. Transfiguring the ephemeral and the transient, Ohmaki conforms to the modern definition of beauty according to Charles Baudelaire, both current and fictional,(1) "to distil the eternal from the transitory".

In Gravity and Grace (2017), the ambiguity is immediately affirmed between the weight, the gravity and the solemn gravity of a monumental vase on one side, and the lightness, the elegance, the evanescence and the imponderable of a play of shadows and lights on the other. The vase is an object in the purest form and whose use goes back even further in the history of humanity. It is an object of recollection of historical time, but also serves to collect flowers or precious liquids. The vase is a recollection or a recollection-pray. By transforming the vase into a magic lantern that casts its motives and dithering into the darkness (Gravity and Grace) or by declining the silhouette in cracked Chinese shadow (Abyss), Shinji Ohmaki recollects a little bit of historical time, little bit of ephemeral and transient. The sculptor magnifies the changing and its trace. One could compare Ohmaki's use of the vase motif to that made by Yasujiro Ozu in Late Spring. All the emotional ambiguity of the girl who leaves her father to marry is played and read in the long shot as a still life centered on the silhouette of the vase. About this plan, Gilles Deleuze writes in the Time-Image: "The vase of Late Spring is interposed between the daughter’s half-smile and the beginning of her tears. There is becoming, change, passage. But the form of what changes, does not itself change, does not pass on. This is time, time itself, "a little time in its pure state": a direct time-image, which gives what changes the unchanging form in which the change is produced. The night that changes into day, or the reverse, recalls a still life on which the light falls, either fading or getting stronger.”(2) Here, too, Shinji Ohmaki captures the change and evanescence of the shadow play on the wall in this motif of the vase, which becomes a figure of the “time itself, a little time in its pure state".

The beauty of the shadow play projected by the vase on the walls of the room changes our relationship to space, makes it vibrate and spin and gives a living sensitivity. The inner light of the vase becomes iridescent and reacts to its environment, as in an iridescence proper to that of the light of the first days of the world. The shadow also makes us switch to an underground world of appearances, overlapping things which are at once the rib and the false pretense, at the same time the essence and the illusion. Lacework or trimmings of light, the ephemeral finds its writing. The vibratory dimension of light offers the fascinating spectacle of meditative contemplation, where the undulations of space are equally ripples of time.

Shinji Ohmaki invents a luminous writing in weightlessness and models the shadows. He always seems to start by posing not a blank canvas but a black space, inspired by the reading of Junichiro Tanizaki's Shadow's Praise, which makes this numinous darkness an essential and primary feature of Japanese aesthetics (“This was the genius of our ancestors, that by cutting off the light from this empty space they imparted to the world of shadows that formed there a quality of mystery and depth superior to that of any wall painting or ornament")(3)Darkness increases the depth and density of an empty space; it inhabits it and makes it live; it becomes the vibratile material, the lung or the pulsating heart. In this shady texture, the luminous patterns projected on the walls become like “that wavering light beating the pulse of the night" (4), a vibratory and deep pulsation. Material and immaterial at the same time, the black of the air is endowed with a whole spectrum of sensible qualities. The shadow becomes material, malleable and fluid, the mysterious clay of the sculptor. A light mist or a thick sheet of heavy silence, compact or translucent, collected, floating or diffuse, the spectacle of Shinji Ohmaki's vase varies the delicate modalities of the shadow. Pregnant between the walls of the exhibition space, darkness unfolds its narrative.

There are artists of light, James Turrell or Ann Veronica Janssens, for example, but Shinji Ohmaki in a novel way sculpts the darkness (see his devices with smoke like the Black House); it deals with the variations of texture and the particular iridescence, the sensible minimalism and the poetic charge. The shady element becomes a rich and new material. Ohmaki exploits the various forms of appearance, and behavior, leaving us as blinded before this birth of light, colors and beings from the darkness - as in the first day of the world.

In the Abyss series, darkness is also the primary element since Shinji Ohmaki presents the shadows of vases to different silhouettes. They are like the ghostly linings of the golden vase series Proof of Existence -abyss- “When you see me, I am looking at you.”, which are also objects with a confirmed twinship, built around axes of symmetry. From reflection to reflection, from refraction to refraction, space loses its stability and becomes a palimpsest of multiple frames. From lining shadows to doubled objects, the proof of existence becomes more and more difficult to establish. Least to be second degree, the shadows of Abyss are like the last echo of an indefinite mise en abîme, or an enigmatic radiography of the traces of time, since we see all the breaks and cracks that make the fragility essential of this seemingly compact object. In his poem Broken Vase, René-François Sully Prudhomme writes:

"But the slight bruising,

Biting the crystal every day,

An invisible and sure walk

Slowly went around. (...)

Always intact in the eyes of the world,

He feels growing and crying very low

His wound is fine and deep;

It's broken, do not touch it. "

The capillarity of cracks that hides in the vase, both "fine and deep" begins "an invisible and sure walk. In all this riddling of cracks, one can see as well a motif of extreme elegance as the scars of an old wound that will lead to an inevitable collapse - the radiography of a catastrophe. Preciousness and sense of loss are patterns that Shinji Ohmaki weaves.

In Tectonics in 2015, Ohmaki had already worked on the pattern of deep dithering and palimpsest. With the work Flotage-Scape, it is the specific vibration, the electroencephalogram proper to a landscape - (5)Mount Guanyin or Mount Fuji - that the artist seeks to find. In Flotage - Tectonics, it's the fingerprint of a landscape, its specific way of thrilling the world that Shinji Ohmaki tries to transcribe. What is the essence of a landscape? its style? This is his specific way of vibrating the world, as the shock of the heel of a woman on the road, said Maurice Merleau-Ponty, it is a set of vibrations and coherent deformations.

White lines on a white background of Tectonics are only seen as transparency effects, as in the latency of reality. They are like traces of time, lines of luck, or strata on the cut of a tree trunk. These lines are both the trace of time that has passed and the clues of the future that the fortune-teller will read in our hand. The blocks of acrylic glass are also crystal balls in which past and future events are seen in transparency, and, according to the method of the coring of the geologist, a stratification of historical time. Telescoping times, these pieces are as much crystalline philosopher stones as a graphic concatenation of scientific data. According to Paul Ricoeur in Memory, History, Forgetting, the "trace" covers at least three distinct realities, which it is important not to confuse: the "memory trace", cerebral or cortical; the "mnemonic" trace, conscious or unconscious; finally, the "written record", which plays a central role in the historiographical operation, but which also defines writing in its most general sense. The Tectonics series of Shinji Ohmaki weaves these three senses of the trace. These drawn and perpetually rewritten lines are at once the veins which are inscribed on the brain, the imprints of an emotional, memorial and emotional brain; the episodes of remembrance and recognition through mirror and reflection effects that invites into a meditative recovery by the viewer placed in front of these reflective walls with backlit interiority; graphic games, the electro-encephalogram of this vital cardiography that runs through time leaving behind an elegant hieroglyphic writing that the viewer must be able to read and interpret.

In these exhibitions, Shinji Ohmaki shows in a palimpsest play between light and shadow the stratifications of the times, from the geological times to the times to come. It moves the relationship to the world to dust off the layers. He makes us see the invisible cracks that have long been wrought in the lining of things, as a visionary making us feel the future catastrophes that are being prepared. From this is born a keen sense of the ephemeral and the immemorial. The impression of eternal beauty of forms is haunted by the disturbing feeling of their impermanence and their vulnerability. Ohmaki's works are lurking in the shadows, on the border between the real and the fantastic, between the appearing and the disappearing.