Art From The Earth

Japanese artist, Yasumitsu Morito is going to show his latest work, a collaborative piece of western ceramic and Japanese traditional pottery from Mashiko.

Review by Gavin Keeney / Agence ‘X’

Morito Yasumitsu

If the work of art is a type of index that always encompasses a much larger world within its singular form, primarily through the wizardry of the artist, but also through the very nature of the materiality of the artwork, then Morito Yasumitsu’s sculpture, while figurative and in many senses working against the grain of present-day representational values, also contains a secret record of his youth digging clay out of the hills of Mashiko, Japan, the mixing of silica and other minerals for glazing, and the multiple experiences of working in a traditional ceramics studio under his father’s guidance and gaze.

This apprenticeship, as in all cases of journeyman activities (modern and pre-modern), is written into the work. What is not written into the work is the evolving relationship to art in its current manifestation as privileged object for an art world that is driven by the collection, circulation, and re-selling of the artwork as hyper-commodity. Yasumitsu’s work contains a traditional bias that resists all of that. What make it extraordinary nonetheless are the artistic qualities that include but exceed what passes today as “sculpture.” The gracefulness of the figures is misleading in this regard. The clay and the textures, the postures and the sensuality are all by contemporary standards “archaic,” and one senses not the influence of the great present-day exemplars of installation art as sculpture nor even the ironic and iconic works of late-modern masters (for example, Louise Bourgeois plus Jeff Koons) but instead Houdon plus Rodin, or neo-classicism as it edges toward modernism, all in gentle defiance of the dictates of the market.

As no artist worth his or her salt would capitulate to what is fashionable, and no one brought up through the traditional apprenticeships of yesterday would willingly submit to the law of the art market today, there is in Yasumitsu’s work, as a result, a beautiful confluence of respect for materiality and form plus an edginess that might be said to index a larger conversation with a “lost” relationship to the past and the wider world that includes the source of sculpture in its material expression – the Earth proper. To inquire into this work is to exit through a door that leads back to Mashiko, into the mountains, and – ultimately – into an alliance with art that acts in concert with the most elemental ethical precepts that are arguably always buried in art awaiting excavation (not unlike “clay”).

Gavin Keeney/Agence ‘X’

March 15, 2012

Copyright Gavin Keeney 2012. May be used for publicity purposes only.

Any changes to the text must be reviewed and approved by the author.

Gavin Keeney

Agence ‘X’

agencex@gmail.com