"Yamamoto Masao" exhibition at the Marcelo Guarnieri Gallery

A Marcelo Guarnieri Gallery presents the solo exhibition of Yamamoto Masao (Gamagori – Japan, 1957). The exhibition is organized around the idea of ​​Ma (間), a Japanese aesthetic and philosophical concept that describes the pause and significant interval between spaces, objects, sounds, movements, and events, and which understands emptiness as an active element that gives form, rhythm, and meaning to experience. The exhibition design is supported by the architect and landscape designer Sakae Ishii.

The exhibition brings together photographs, photobooks, and poem-boxes produced over more than three decades of Yamamoto Masao's career, featuring works from the series... A Box of Ku, Nakazora, Kawa=Flow, Shizuka=Cleanse and Bonsai – Microcosms Macrocosms, Developed between the early 1990s and recent years, Sakae Ishii's collaboration is inspired by Yamamoto's poetics, bringing stone benches and pink granite slabs to the gallery space, inviting the viewer to a place of rest. "Silence, intervals, and emptiness also serve to create distances between things, making them clearer to the eye," says Ishii.

Em Shizuka = ​​Cleanse (2012), Yamamoto moves away from the idea of ​​photographing landscapes and begins to focus his gaze on small elements found during his walks through the forest. Stones, roots, branches and other fragments of nature are photographed in isolation against a deep black background, transforming into almost sculptural presences.

Em Bonsai – Microcosms MacrocosmsInitiated in 2018 based on the records of bonsai cultivated by Minoru Akiyama, the youngest bonsai master to receive the Prime Minister's Award of Japan, Yamamoto seeks to understand the symbolism of this age-old practice, conceived as a collaboration between human and plant action. In his images, bonsai cease to be miniature plants and become condensed landscapes, capable of transforming the atmosphere of the space around them and awakening a contemplative experience.

In addition to photographs, the exhibition presents different editorial formats developed by the artist throughout his career, such as accordion books and poem boxes from the series. Ryokan. Each of these boxes contains approximately six small photographs accompanied by a haiku by the Zen Buddhist poet and monk Ryōkan (1758–1831). Displayed in glass cases, they reveal an intimate dialogue between word and image, inviting the visitor to a slow and fragmented reading. The books, in turn, are presented open, allowing all the photographs to be seen simultaneously.

For Yamamoto, these supports also constitute exhibition spaces, in which the experience of photography involves not only the image, but its materiality: the worn edges of the paper, the marks of time, the texture of the print, and the reduced scale reinforce the intimate character of his production. Many photographs are manually manipulated, dyed, worn, or marked by the artist's hands, acquiring an appearance akin to that of small reliquaries. Yamamoto emphasizes aging and impermanence as qualities inherent both to the images and to the experience of life itself.

By juxtaposing Yamamoto's photographs with the intervention conceived by Ishii, the exhibition highlights Ma (間) as a principle that organizes both the visual composition and the visitor's spatial experience, causing intervals, pauses, and voids to assume a structuring role in the perception of the work.

The Marcelo Guarnieri Gallery thanks Sakae Ishii for her collaboration, whose generosity transcends this exhibition and is part of a relationship of friendship, dialogue, and exchange cultivated over the years.