Otani Workshop

Perrotin is pleased to present Otani Workshop’s eighth solo exhibition with the gallery and the second in Paris. A major figure in Japanese ceramics, Otani Workshop uses painting and sculpture to create elemental forms that explore the mysterious world of childhood, evoking a sense of the uncanny.

The False Innocence of Unspoiled Faces

Since the dawn of time, humans have shaped the earth into figures. With nimble, sometimes rugged hands, they mold mud, clay, or earth into heads, bodies, and limbs. Then comes the firing and fusion: fire hardens and petrifies. It’s a world of metamorphoses. From Volterra to Delphi, from Prometheus to Vulcan, from Auguste Rodin to Lucio Fontana, this practice spans cultures and eras. At the age of seventeen, the young Shigeru Otani discovered Alberto Giacometti. One is not serious at seventeen, as Arthur Rimbaud said, for the wild heart roams free and the pure, almost fresh gaze is open to the infinite. At seventeen, you can see everything, understand everything. The Japanese artist understood that Giacometti had spent his life capturing the fleeting essence of the visible, grasping the irreducibility of beings and things, beyond which everything decays and falls into ruin. Visiting museums, temples, and shrines, and sleeping in an old van, Otani Workshop tirelessly explored these age-old, primordial gestures, realizing that there is nothing else to do but craft splendid, elemental figures, as old as the world itself, akin to the Cycladic idols or the Moai of Easter Island.

Otani Workshop’s round, silent, literally wide-eyed heads belong to the realm of childhood, but one that is anxious and threatened, characterized by tears, closed mouths, vacant eyes, stiff gestures, and subdued smiles. These silent partners have an uncanny air: familiar, yet frightening, enigmatic, yet deceptively innocent. They are reminiscent of porcelain dolls and manga, of Pinocchio and Hello Kitty, of a cuddly toy and a talisman. These poignant substitutes evoke the dead and summon the missing in an archipelago where, ever since those fateful nights over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, everyone knows that life can vanish in a flash, in a burst of light, in a huge cloud.

Using Shigaraki clay, a renowned material mined locally since the Middle Ages, Otani Workshop crafts votive figurines, explores rudimentary and multicolored forms, repeats expiatory gestures, and performs exorcisms, much like Takashi Murakami and Yayoi Kusama. Creating to ward off evil. Always.

While the bronzes showcase technical virtuosity, with their fine chiseling and delicate patina, Otani Workshop’s ceramics create a truly wondrous world, a wonder that is found in tales and fables, tugs at the heart, and haunts the darkest dreams. His paintings spring from the same desire and reverie, seeking to bring to the surface the same faces that appear in the terracotta and bronze sculptures. The colors are never garish; they are muted, almost subdued, like the sounds of a muffled piano. With chisel or brush and sovereign restraint, Otani Workshop contemplates the grace of these rudimentary heads, allowing us “to see something unknown emerge each day in the same face,” to borrow Giacometti’s programmatic words. What remains when the marks that crease the skin, wrinkle the eyes, and scar the cheeks fade, when the physical signs and facial changes dissolve? What remains is the bare childhood of an unblemished face. Before the great tragedy, the dark cloud, and the little death.

—Colin Lemoine