'Imagination without skill gives us contemporary art," quipped the playwright Tom Stoppard in an essay in 2000.
Skill arguably became irrelevant when modernism arrived in the 20th century, as rendering landscapes and bodies with myopic precision came to seem conservative. Even now, skill alone is unlikely to secure an artist a significant place in the art world. A timely redress to such a state is found in the unsurpassable technical abilities -- and imagination -- in Shinji Ogawa's solo exhibition, "Interfering Worlds," at The National Museum of Art, Osaka.
An initial draw is Ogawa's consummate draughtsmanship in the series "Moire" (2005-6). What first appear to be photographs on closer inspection turn out to be drawings in pencil, and while the images all have a similar appearance, they are composed of structurally different elements. Based on the island town of Mont-Saint-Michel in Normandy, France, the drawings offer subtle physical changes between the imagined composition of landscapes, oceans, church spires and tenements.