@photodocumenta
Artist Rooms 2025
Tomoya Matsuzaki | Manuela Falcão | Antony Cairns
at Encounter, Lisbon
Antony Cairns has selected a series of images (stills from 2014-24) of the metropolis at night printed on aluminium silver gelatin coated plates. Originating as black and white negatives on film, he began developing his pictures of cities on metallic sheets, employing the spills and imperfections of the complex process to produce intricate, abstract photographs. Drawn from an archive of images - from London to Tokyo, Shanghai to Seoul - at the core of the artist’s practice is a fascination with the process by which the metaphorical potential of the photographic image can be extended through innovative methods of reproduction. Through his experiments with antiquated photographic technologies, the places Cairns captures become hazy in both their form and location, distorted and non-linear, creating a unique atmosphere. Through his engagement with complex methods of image making -- such as the effect of light on 35mm black and white film transparencies—the focus moves from the specificity of the architectural forms captured, to the peripheral spaces which exist between them. The sites' Cairns records thus become amorphous, a sprawling maze of structures, lights and shapes. Imbued with a general sense of urbanized space and the ambience of a metropolis at night, the nebulous imagery disrupts the sharp, recognisable architectural structures of the city and begins to bleed into abstract ‘shapes of light’. What was once familiar is thus re-visioned and made strange, transformed by having been subject to a reverse technological torque.
Manuela Falcão utilises intuitive and experimental processes of moulding, glazing and firing to imbue each of her ceramic sculptures with a distinctive identity and dynamism. Whilst gesturing towards formal histories of abstraction, this series is also strongly rooted in environment, both built and organic. Some of the striking forms read as newly discovered organisms stretching out into space, whilst others seem to have more
Concerned with painterly architectures, Tomoya Matsuzaki’s sensitive works are profoundly rooted in landscape both personal and collective, remembered and embodied. Primarily engaged with atmospheres of place, soft edged marks hover and converge to form fleeting suggestions of environment. In these enigmatic objects, half-familiar moons and suns emerge from a reduced palette of colour casting dappled shadows across the ground. The artist's repeating compositional motifs recall not only the changing temperament of the sky on a cloudy day but histories of modern British painting and sculpture from Nash to Hepworth. In his distinctive practice, which extends well beyond the two dimensional picture plane, collecting, curating and intuitive mark making intersect to become a form of ongoing research. These diverse interests productively overlap to open up alternate possibilities for the spaces that a painting can inhabit. Instead of limiting the artwork to the boundaries of a flat surface, Matsuzaki views it as a three-dimensional object spilling across borders and out of the frame. He paints with oil on the surface of irregularly formed jesmonite slabs, mounting pieces on structural wooden beams or integrating found objects within their compositions. As such, the viewer operates both within and outside the installation, both paintings and objects become vessels of memory carrying impressions of the lands through which they have passed.
Artist Rooms 2025 runned from 21st March — 17th May 2025