When exactly can we suggest that an artwork is completed, brought to perfection, has definitely reached its final stage?
Is this when it is invented, completed physically or even when it is destructed and has fallen to dust again? Actually this process of art creation is potentially endless, it lasts as long as the artwork is perceived by the spectator and it may continue even after the physical destruction of the actual work, when nothing but the non-material idea of it survives.
Ogawa's sculptures signify in their own very special way the spiritual flexibility of an artwork by transforming it into a physically moveable structure. The artist transforms the trigonometric basic forms cubus, sphere and pyramid to mechanically moveable objects with maximal complex segment variations in a very elegant and playful way. In Ogawa's works the poetic image of the sculptor who with his tools is able to set free the one form that had been hidden in the block of stone besides an endless variety of other possibilities, is transformed into a very concrete skillful game which has its conceptual roots in Origami, the art of paper folding.
An important feature of Ogawa's sculptures is the fact that though the active handling of his objects, the changing, opening, closing, taking apart and putting together again is always possible, it is never essential for the message of his work. Just as fascinating as the actual game is the contemplation of the object frozen to a momentary position, which provokes the successive mental rehearsal of its possibilities to change its appearance.
The ambiguity of a determined situation and a very changeable openness, which simultaneously is regular as well as chaotic, make it impossible to judge Ogawa's sculptures by traditional scales. Instead of inventing a single definite form, the artist strives to offer a certain defined variety of possibilities within the form. The imagination of the spectator is invited to travel freely within this arsenal of possibilities, though the rules of transformation and modes of function within each object are clearly defined by its creator. By means of their refined esthetical appeal, Ogawa's changeable objects make way for a meditative study of elementary mechanisms of metamorphosis.
Thomas Huber