Stretch Sculpture

Sukenari

Unlike two-dimensional pictures, three-dimensional sculptures incorporate the perceiving recipient not only as a viewer, but also as an "occupant". For his architectonic sculptures, Sukenari first scans the conditions and possibilities of the space: its horizontal and vertical dimensions as well as its volume.

without title, 1994
Plywood, wood, paint 273 x 423 x 232 cm
(Photo: Tadasu Yamamoto)

With oversized colourful segment and pipe forms, the artist "corrects" the spatial experience, not so much to give evidence of the specific conditions, but rather to take hold of it on the basis of his own logics. What is monumentally inflated in space is delivered as a folded up bundle of fabric in a normal suitcase. The bulging volumes of the sculptures that bring the morphological variety of the basic geometric forms cylinder, cone, cubuid... to bear in space are filled with air and are kept in shape by a compressor. The fascination of the forms is based on the paradox of a concentrated excess that knows how to combine reductivity and complexity, analysis and emotion, the vocabulary of minimalism with the erratic, garish environment of present-day Japan. In Sukenari's inflatable installations, the traditional asceticism of geometrical forms meets contemporary materials such as plastic and nylon and a corresponding colourfulness that brings to mind the conventional surfaces of his day-to-day urban life.

Heaven Peace Blood, 2003
Nylon,Ventilator 353 x 1142 x 91 cm

Often - as is the case in the Kunsthaus Meran -, the artist plays two elements, two colour schemes off against each other, using a precise configuration to turn space into a comprehensive pictorial space and place the viewer in the - one could almost call it illusionist - centre of it.

(Extract from the catalogue introduction by Marion Piffer Damiani)

Heaven Peace Blood, 2003
Nylon,Ventilator 353 x 1142 x 91 cm