There’s something about rock that just begs to be carved and chiselled. Maybe it’s to do with the arrogance of mankind that we need to manipulate the hardest of substances, that we allow nothing to be the master of us. From Stonehenge to Mount Rushmore, Michelangelo’s ‘David’ to Marc Quinn’s Fourth Plinth statue of Alison Lapper, humans have been stamping their artistic vision on to stone for millennia.
Yutaka Sone is no different. But he takes the mastery of rock into a new direction. The Japanese artist’s works on show at David Zwirner’s Mayfair gallery are intricate and precise topographical maps of island cities in pure white marble. The three sculptures, which between them took 20 years to create, depict Hong Kong, Manhattan and Venice in painstaking detail. All were made with the help of hugely skilled Chinese craftsmen, and it’s incredible to see marble manipulated in such a precise way. The works are so tactile that, as you crouch down to eye level, you want to reach out and flick the spires of Venice or the skyscrapers of the Big Apple (don’t bother, they won’t fall over, I tried. Unless the gallery is reading this, in which case I definitely did not). That’s part of what makes them so beautiful: they’re so slight. The hills of Hong Kong glitter like fresh snow, the docks of NYC teeter precariously. Sone’s masterstroke is to make marble look somehow insubstantial.
The sculptures are also permanent images of impermanent places. Cities grow, change and sometimes even sink (ciao, Venice). Sone’s work manages brilliantly to walk a beautiful artistic tightrope between the powerfully permanent and dangerously fragile. Sure, the sculptures are essentially hugely indulgent, preposterous and (probably) stupidly expensive marble versions of Google maps. But they really are quite breathtaking.
Eddy Frankel