EXHIBITIONS
Ittetsu Matsuoka “what i know”
Dates: Apr 22 – May 20, 2023
Location: amanaTIGP
Opening reception: Saturday, Apr 22, 17:00 – 19:00
The gallery will implement necessary measures to prevent coronavirus infections.
amanaTIGP is pleased to present “what i know,” an exhibition of Ittetsu Matsuoka’s works, from April 22 through May 20. This is Matsuoka’s second solo exhibition at the gallery – his first having taken place three years ago – and will feature approximately 23 of his photographs taken around Japan and Vietnam between 2020 and 2023.
Alongside a successful career in advertising photography, where his focus lies in portraiture and fashion, Matsuoka has also produced art photography that captures scenery, people, plants, flowers – subjects encountered in his everyday life. In these works, such sights that we all might come across in our day-to-day are infused with a distinctively analog color palette and a unique softness afforded by bure (blur) and bokeh (out-of-focus) effects. The result is a muted tone with a somewhat reduced sense of reality, which confers equal value and significance on everything presented within the frames.
In recent years, Matsuoka’s output has been taking an increasingly abstract turn. The new works in this exhibition, such as “bloom” (2022), which shows grains of color spreading out like a haze, or “frue” (2020) with its distinctive rich blues and organic undulations, reflect his growing interest in abstract expression in photography. His idiosyncratic compositions, meanwhile, have been shaped by a lifelong interest in paintings. The frames are divided and punctuated by lines, forms, sometimes colors – subconscious yet definite elements that appear in many of the images, establishing a certain continuity with works from his previous exhibition, “Yasashiidake.”
Thoughts (to me, they are eyes) soar and soar, and my photographs grow abstract, sometimes becoming just colors.
Sometimes becoming just shapes.
And this creates a space that offers a better chance of resonating with the other.
[…]
More and more abstract,
more and more concrete.
With these photographs lying in between.
Ittetsu Matsuoka, March 2023
In Matsuoka’s works, the amorphous images consisting of colors and forms awaken memories within each viewer – an effect akin to that of smell in the so-called “Proust phenomenon” (autobiographical memory recall) – thereby establishing a new relationship between work and viewer. These photographs, which were taken between 2020 and 2023 during the COVID-19 pandemic, are a “photographic record” in Matsuoka’s words; even in a society where our connections with others were disrupted, Matsuoka continued to confront the world by focusing his lens on the everyday. The countless moments he thus captured have accumulated into his record, his memory – images that glow more brightly as they resonate with the memories scattered within us.
Ittetsu Matsuoka was born in 1978 in Gifu. After graduating from the Photography Department at the College of Art of Nihon University, he worked at studio FOBOS before going independent. While working as a freelance photographer, he launched “THERME gallery” in June 2008. He primarily produces advertising, fashion, and other commercial works, while simultaneously shooting his everyday surroundings and capturing the world through an even perspective. His main solo exhibitions include “Yasashiidake,” Taka Ishii Gallery Photography/Film (Tokyo, 2020), “MARII,” Bookmarc (Tokyo, 2018), “MARII,” Morioka Shoten (Tokyo, 2018), “Purple Matter,” Daitokai (Tokyo, 2014), “Yasashiidake,” Ruroudou (Tokyo, 2014), and “Tokyo μ grains,” THERME Gallery (Tokyo, 2011). He is currently based in Tokyo.
