Sheldon Museum of Art

 

Date of this Version

1986

Citation

Resource/Reservoir, Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, 1986

Comments

All images are copyright by the original artists. Publication copyright 1986 The Regents of the University of Nebraska

Abstract

In this diverse age of artistic pluralism, retrospection and cynicism, Jun Kaneko's ceramic sculptures prevail as confirmations of essential constancies. The certainties of man's elemental graphic urge, the determinism of archetypal shapes, and the symbiosis of time and space are all revealed in Kaneko's three dimensional abstractions.

Kaneko employs abstraction, not to transcend contemporary complexities, but to reveal the inherent synchrony of the natural world. From a position of acceptance, rather than control, Kaneko is but one participant in a private conversation with his media. And though this internal conversation is not directed at Kaneko's audience, we partake of his direct access to the absolute of form evolving in space.

Kaneko's bi-cultural experience and non-hierarchical sense of reality enable him to interpret the sculptural properties, rather than to predict them. His response to the organic pliability of the raw clay and transparent glazes permits the revelation of the underlying equilibrium of the world in flux.

Thus Kaneko's role is more collaborative than singular. His is a process based on intuitive observation of the interacting materials. It is his reception, rather than his manipulation of the innate sculptural qualities that determines the ultimate resolution of the work. Kaneko's measured orchestration of the interplay of clay and form, surface and pattern, is toward the extraction of a visible harmony. The pattemed surfaces and emphatic shapes emerge from a gestalt of eastern and western aesthetics as precise distillations of Kaneko's vision--a vision seen from within nature, ordered by mark-making and time.

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