Emblematic bronze presences, these sculptures will remain on display until 2024
Those arriving by train to Pietrasanta meet outside the station an imposing sculpture realized with candid marble: a gently arched and carefully polished block, characterized and solved by a very large central hole: a mysterious window inserted in a contrasting concept of outside and inside, a question to be addressed to those who arrive, to those who leave and to those who linger in calamitous admiration. It is an artwork by the Japanese sculptor Kan Yasuda, entitled Chiave del Sogno, which perfectly translates his recurring belief: “The energy of the sculptures will echo perfectly with the magic of the place to sublimate together”. And this concept is combined both with Carrara marble, which our author has been working for many years, and with bronze that proposes the same visual and tactile seductions; a concept to be transferred to the charm of perception that involves people and environments “contaminated” from these emblematic presences.
CREATIONS WITH A STUDIED HARMONY THAT EMANATE A DEEP MYSTERY
In fact, his sculpture is an oracle to be questioned to obtain answers or to raise further questions related to recurring existential questions. Now, nine of his great artworks in bronze mark the Terrace of the Republic, in Viareggio as renewable moments of pause and questioning for those passing and are forced to wonder why similar forms that seem to arise from another world and a time not measurable by the common measure of things.
THE ZEN SPIRIT CAUSES HIM TO SHAPE A CENTER OF PURITY AROUND WHICH EVERYTHING REVOLVES
When in the early 1970s Yasuda, born in 1945 in Bibai on the island of Hokkaido, came to Pietrasanta brought with him that Zen spirit that binds him indissolubly to the native land and that causes him to shape and modulate a center of purity around which everything revolves. So these creations appear; they are not the mirror of a visible reality but induce people to recognize themselves in their studied harmony, in their deep mystery, in their intrinsic and unattainable lightness. Not surprisingly, Bruno Munari (our minimalist master, able to bring out masterpieces from a simple formal intuition), on the occasion of his first Italian exhibition in Milan in 1991, said that his artworks did not contain anything but represented the whole. And Fred Licht reiterated in 2007, accompanying Yasuda’s solo exhibition at the Mercati di Traiano in Rome: “His sculptures require something that goes beyond the sense of sight or the sense of touch, beyond critical intelligence. They ask us to absorb them, to recreate them in our memory”.
PEACCORDING TO BRUNO MUNARI, THESE ARTWORKS CONTAIN NOTHING BUT REPRESENT EVERYTHING
If we investigate now the exhibition path that, to varying degrees, will characterize this Versilia environment until the summer of next year, we can try to enter, with the necessary mood, in the spirit suggested by similar artworks. And we realize that a magical conversation of extraordinary complicity can be born. In fact, if Myomu proposes that alternation of void and full that is found in the aforementioned and ideal twin exhibited in marble in Pietrasanta, an insinuating questioning suspension accompanies Kaiman and Seitan. And in their refined exhibition rhythm unfold the other forms on display aroused by an ancestral harmony that involves gestures and thoughts. This seductive story, moreover, does not know a beginning and an end, but is renewed with every transit and every glance.
