MINIMAL AESTHETIC

As soon as you accept the accidental effects, they are no longer accidents. They are necessity, the part of yourself that you could not expect or design beforehand. Thus the realm of your creativity grows wider.

—Kazuaki Tanahashi

30th Mar 2013

three charred panels —david nash :: tate, st. ives

Three Charred Panels of beech have been hung like a triptych. The cuts in each are vertical, diagonal and horizontal. Against the white wall they have a severe minimalist beauty, for black absorbs light rather than giving it back. Scorching has long been an important process for Nash. It has a practical as well as a semi-mystical purpose. Fire both cauterises and purifies. For despite the earthy muscularity of his work he has, over the years, been much influenced by the philosophy of Rudolph Steiner, by Plato’s vision of reincarnation and Tao Tai Ching, a form of Buddhism. Charring removes the narrative history of the living wood, erasing what he considers to be the aesthetic distraction of the grain. As carbon, the sculptural form can be viewed with greater clarity. Charring is also associated with the transformations that occurred in mediaeval alchemy when two opposing elements are heated in a crucible to produce a new synthesis. The phoenix rising from the ashes is an alchemical symbol of renewal and rebirth; themes that occur subtly but insistently throughout Nash’s work. For as the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote in The Psychoanalysis of Fire, “Fire is the ultra-living element. It is intimate and it is universal … Among all phenomena, it is really the only one to which there can be so definitely attributed the opposing values of good and evil”. —excerpt from “david nash: making and placing abstract sculpture 1978-2004 by sue hubbard, art critic