On a Still Surface

Hikari Ono was born in 1990 in Lüneburg (Germany). She currently lives in Tokyo.

Hikari Ono’s work consists mainly of small clay sculptures with minimal forms and a limited but delicate repertoire of colors; however, the apparent modesty and the obvious playfulness of these works do not hide their strong analytical ambition for long.

Through her practice of clay modeling alone, the most archaic and direct way of shaping a solid, the artist demonstrates her interest in returning to primary structures. Each piece is subject to only a few essential interventions such as laceration, grooving, crushing or spreading, and hollowing out or adding. Often these marks testify to the presence of her fingers, including their visible imprint. Ono’s works are fundamentally tactile, and not just because they are hand-sized.

What ultimately gives her pieces their ambiguity, and hence their power, is that they go beyond a strict exercise in deconstruction to dialogue with the realm of painting. The marks applied to the clay are reminiscent of a Baroque drapery or the vibrant surface of an abstract painting; they evoke Robert Ryman’s brushstroke, Lucio Fontana’s punctures or, more often than not, some other unidentified and happy pictorial invention. In this sense, although the artist is exploring the grammar of sculpture, she does so to have it speak the language of painting.

Hikari Ono is represented by XYZ Collective (Tokyo)