Metamorphosis of Senses (Created during a three-year stay in Japan)

Exhibition in Gallery O2 Kanazawa, Japan

Vaclav Rezac is a glass artist from the Czech Republic who has inherited the creative Czech contemporary glass art tradition that started in the 1950s. The series “Metamorphosis of Senses” is characterized by geometric and precise shapes amalgamated with lifelike shapes made of molten glass. The artist creates his works by pouring molten glass heated in the kiln on top of carefully grinded kiln cast bases, which he calls Crepidoma. Rezac uses chance and design in his process, highlighting the extreme opposites of the material characteristics of glass. This process is symbolic of the artist fusing his two opposing natures within him: reason (rational approach toward creating glass art) and intuition (unstable emotions). Thus, his form of work is the inner ‘Metamorphosis of Senses’ that is happening within himself as result of a dialectic process between ‘contradiction’ and ‘synthesis’.

Rezac came to Japan in 2016 as an Associate Professor at Toyama City Institute of Glass Art. Being used to the European environment, he found Japanese culture both inspiring and difficult to live in. This experience helped Rezac develop the emotional aspects in his work; unlike his old works, his new pieces show erotic sensuality and dynamism. Two of the major pieces from this exhibition in particular display such development: “autumn sky”, a heavily deformed dappled piece with the image of cirrocumulus clouds, and “cruel desire”, a pink disk-like piece with clear glass poured generously on a dented area. In the latter piece, Rezac accepted an accidental deformation and breakage that happened in the creation process as part of his work. This allowed the glass pieces to emphasize the dynamic fluid forms and express the primal eroticism that molten glass fundamentally possesses. This exhibition a compilation of his work in Japan, but also an important milestone that marks Rezac to be reborn as a true glass artist.

Kozo Hatakeyama
Senior Specialist TOYAMA GLASS ART MUSEUM