Ogata let his shapes free from any geometric excess, and now he looks with more interest to the taste than the shapes’ rigours. The rotundity is an idea of perfection by itself and it doesn’t need of being stressed by the stiff of lines and borders, like volumes can dissipate in the light and the air without losing solidity and stability by the sculpture.
(Personale al Castello Malaspina)

Se la goccia, che virtuosamente Ogata pone spesso sospesa ed appesa, distinta e sovrastante quelle steli, figura afferrata microscopicamente una virtualità nell’atto del suo accadere, il nastro della sua fluenza introduce, diversamente, una dispiegata componente dinamica in realtà essenziale alla ragione più intima dell’immaginazione formativa plastica di Ogata.
La goccia, nella sua assolutezza, formalizza un’origine che riassume il senso sia della vita, sia della ciclicità naturale, cielo-terra-cielo-terra.
La scia, l’impronta, formalizza il divenire della vita, quanto il continuo rinnovarsi su se medesima della natura. E l’impostazione verticale, prevalente, suggerisce una sorta di funzionalità sacrale dell’oggetto scultura, quasi cippo rituale monitorio che raccolga l’immagine di un vitale ritornante evento fondativo.

In this essay on the sculptural work of Yoshin Ogata, I shall attempt to explain in a clear and simple way the various creative phases by which artists, Ogata included, carry out their own lines of inquiry within their own specific field, that of the visual arts, contributing to the construction of culture. But I would also like to promote an understanding of modern society's cultural System, with all the tensions, contradictions and breakdowns of our time, high-lighting the qualitative values of the most important works, in the great career of the Japanese artist who has lived and worked in Tuscany for the past twenty years, in the historical sites of the marble quarries of Carrara, Massa and Pietrasanta.
The cold, the winter freeze and the abundant spring rains contribute in a natural way to scaling the rock off the mountain peak so that it tumbles down to the valley in a tumultuous path, glancing off other rocks, breaking up into pieces and getting chipped, thus greatly changing its original "shape".
The bone that time has cleaned, the stone that the current has drilled and smoothed are the archetypical shapes of the mythology of sculpture.
Materials have their history and it is this that molds them, renders them a form
without implying a given and immutable form which one can only imitate or represent, but instead a shape that people perceive with their senses, interpret with their intellects and change through their actions.
On Poetics
Ogata's artistic process, according to a "working poetics", moves from the visual sensation to the sentiment; in this process from the physical to the moral, the artist is his contemporaries' guide, since nature is not only the source of sentiment but also a catalyst of thought. We see, but we know that what we see is merely a fragment of reality; we realize that on this side and on that side of that fragment, the extension of space and time is infinite and the cosmic forces that produce phenomena are ponderous and obscure; with thought we stray beyond what we see and what is visible, into the domain of dreams, memory, fantasy,premonitions and intuitions. This is how what we see comes to lose all interest while what we do not see yet believe exists captivates and fills us with awe by its infinite multiplicity which creates a sense of anguish at our own finiteness; this transcendental reality is the sublime that flows from the stone that is carved and plied by the currents of the sentiments.
Doubtlessly, the poetics of the sublime exalts in art the total expression of existence which is no longer justified by an end beyond the world: either one throws oneself completely into one's relationships with others and the self dissolves in a relativity without end, or the self becomes absolute, but breaks ali ties with what is other than itself.
Neither of the two solutions is possible without the other; by this I mean that whoever lives by his relationship with the world - and Ogata is deeply aware of this - will always feel the anxiety of what lies beyond; while whoever lives beyond the world will always feel the absurdity of his own solitude. "The history of modern art from the mid-eighteenth century to today is the often dramatic history of the pursuit, between the individual and society, of a relationship that will not dissolve the individual in the endless multiplicity of society and that does not place him outside of it like a stranger, nor against it, like a rebel" (C.G. Argan).
On Themes
From the veining spring rivulets, we see the water flow; we sense self-perpetuation in the forms, the life cycle, the quest for an atavistic encounter between man and water. It is in the extraordinary simplicity of the forms that we manage to grasp the complexity of the narration of the theme; the forms transcend the symbolic abstraction and are thus recognizable, appearing to us fully formed. They punctuate the space through successions of rough and polished surfaces; they refract and recede like ocean swells and the astonished observer sits and watches as the space is carved like marble, in celebration of water.
This is the authentic myth of eternal innocence; the theme of the "continual" understood as the coming and growth of the organic had already appeared in Hogarth's series of curved and wavy lines. And it is precisely marble, with its smoothness, that lends itself to the best interpretation of the sensation of the running and flowing of water, and marks through solid and hollow surfaces the musicality of the billowing movement. Once again, it is the marble, symbol of ethereal stone of time, to cadence the association with water, fundamental element of life.
Marmoreal dynamism, a contradiction of terms, is a paradox that marks all of Ogata's works, where the harmonic balance springs from the perfect coexistence of opposites: the alternation of solids and hollows, smooth and rough surfaces, closed circular forms and, around them, open surfaces, that seem ready to receive the drop that falls: a drop that will never fall, but is fixed in continuous dynamic motion, captured the instant before the insemination, the event, of the fall, and hence brimming with all the tension that characterizes the moment before the action.
It is this agreement between opposite, complementary elements, this atemporal spatiality that confers on Ogata's sculptures their own identity which goes beyond the canons regarding their place in culture and history, and that endows his work with a universal language.
On Media
The choice of media, where color has a fundamental importance, is refined; it ranges from Belgian black marble to statuary white, red Persian travertine and gray. The decision to express himself through stone materiate with precise colorings suggests what Ogata thinks of color: that it is not a decorative factor but a structural element that gives body and soul to the sculpture. Even when he establishes combinations through inlays of different kinds of stone, he always does it with an intuition of the structure that leaves no room for decorativism, let alone cloyingness.
On Color
Color, very often, is considered in relation to the art of painting more than in relation to sculpture. If, instead, it is assessed from the perceptual viewpoint, it is easy to understand how strong a role it plays in three-dimensional art: architec-ture and sculpture. In fact, color is a powerful tool that Ogata uses to give visual solidity, making it an organic part of the work itself.
On Comparison
When working in an urban or landscape context, he approaches the surroundings, seeking the key that will allow him to achieve results with a remarkable visual impact, going beyond sculpture as an end in itself.
Sculture as architecture: it might seem absurd, but there is no doubt that Yoshin Ogata, even if in an unpremeditated way, takes as a reference the concept of space that the great architect F.L. Wright demonstrated in his own time. For both, architecture, like sculpture, is pure creation: as such, it does not descend from history, but subverts history's order, contradicts it. Architecture is anti-historical, tackling problems at their root, in the relationship between form and nature as if it were an intrinsic fact, linked by a private understanding, deep and far-reaching, almost a sublimation of reality in man's mind and his work. Already, Wright, like Ogata, had made a crucial contribution to bringing the eastern artistic culture (see the Hotel Imperial in Tokyo) together with that of the west, by means of a sort of boxing "clinch". In fact, reality in both Wright and Ogata is not seen so much in terms of external details as in terms of interior rhythms of grouping and development, a fundamental principle of organic art.


Japanese version
( Gabriele Mazzotta Edition)

The Ogata’s poetic is double and as it affirms something, it concludes with the opposite thing. It let it go with the transformation of the natural “fragments”. Since the world is always changing, a game of increasing and decreasing, filling and empting, finishing and re-starting; since the life circumstances and cases change continuosly, he folds and changes, like the grass that bends under the wind and the waves that melt on the beaches.
(Antonio Amighini Edition)

Yoshin Ogata was born as a painter. The lights and the shadows magnified by the colours in the painting expressions are now collected all together in the … of the marble, in the creation of the shapes which offer huge iconographic occasions exactly to the life circle. The representing and creating skill that is in his natural talent perpetuates a tradition of his own country, where the never-ending delicacies of a flowered garden and the symbolic images, which feed the creativity’s practice, follow each other along a fantastic thread on which the being’s dynamism sorts out.

Ogata as a sculpture: firstly I would immediately say that he doesn’t represent, but he discovers while creating, he makes aristocratic and high his moulding-shaping- philosophy by a mental cleaning (that is also full of culture), a will of showing moments of narrative-lyric … that are really original.
(Castelnuovo Magra city)

Ogata learnt it to shape and modulate his …, his columns, his wedges, his spires. However, I would say that the drop, the water, remain than at the far origin of the training process of the images which live thanks to their own virtue. Even if you would want to charge the drop with an unknown symbolic value, in the end a “former” remains, like any other objective reality compared to the formal essence.

The sum between aesthetic vocation and artistic statute was born inside Ogata from the research conducted outside the descriptive tone(although there are some “mimetic” features) and well inside an idea that made itself primary field of energy meant as “event’s space”.

(Edizioni Bora Bologna)

Yoshin ogata is in short a sculpture of singular classicism: an all-oriental classicism in the metaphorical and emblematic harmonies of the Shape, and an occidental one in the sculpture’s balances as well as in the architecture and in the space’s design.
(Edizioni Bora Bologna)

Ogata made different sculptures about the drop’s theme, as he would refute the famous motto “gutta cavat petram”. In fact, in these works, which have the drop’s theme, we can find the opposite process of that in the latin motto, so it is possible to say about them: “petram cavat guttam”.
(Edizioni Bora Bologna)

"Stream" is basic philosophy behind Ogata's sculpture. However it is not a simple stream like form, but rather a form condensing the richness of the essence expressed by lime and space as acertain obj ec temer gè s. Drawing onthe concepì of basic forms of pure sculpture created by Brancusi and Arp, his works appear in various forms in which an instant memory of streams of time and space is fixed. As may be seen in the works of the 1970's, such as "In a Stream", "Person and Stream", "A Person who Crosses a Stream", "Counter - stream" etc., the sculptor tries to express vividly a story of two confronting concepts of nature and abstraction.
Ogataexpresses himself in his forms where the movements are difficult to seize and crystallized themselves within geometrie constructions, which can be the richness of the essence expressed by streams of time and space. Ogata's approaches towards materials are in twofold directions, exposing a form outside and conceiving a form inside in order to avoid the dominance of shape for shape's sake in his works.
If to expose a form outside is a western idea, anda to conceive a form inside is an Orientai idea his form must, appearing both synonymously and repeatedly, represent the search for a new possible harmony. In this context, he belongs in the group of artists who try to pursue the possibilities in dialogue between two different artistic forms of the Occident and the Orient. In Europe, particularly, it is often said that the key to the frequent uneven phases seen in his works may be found in the symbols of Taoism in the Orient. His works in the 1980's showed changes in form. The shape of "stream" in the 1970's was an element composing a form itself, wich therefore stili ran the risk of recalling the stiffness of form at a moment when time and space is condensed. The "stream" of the 1980's in his works had begun to appear not as a whole form but clearly as a memory of a "stream of water" in a form. The water streams towards eternity and accompanies "a falling water - drop". Naturally, this "water drop" symbolizes the origin of life. It becomes a water stream forming waves and springing out from the surrounding geometrie compositions. The surfaces of compositions are always cut open and wounded,and become opaque because of undecipherable signs and handwriting. "A water drop" flows rhythmically sometimes along the surface or through the inside, springs out, stream of a continuously changing life. Most of Ogata's works in the 1980"s entitled "Water Imprint", are also the unexpected expressions of various poems and incidents which are woven by water streams and drops. An Italian art critic, Viana Conti said once, "Ogata"s works say that something must stili be going to happen". What she seems to have meant is the mystery of life, at which a "water drop" hints. Living in La Spezia, Italy, working in Carrara, a centre for marble, and showing his deep affection for Belgian black marble, Ogata has already exhibited his works in various cities in Europe and won prizes in several international competitions. He is one of these sculptors who try pursue harmony between materials and ideas, and his sculptures will continue to attract considerable attention in future.


Japanese version