João Maria Gusmão, Massa Confusa

JTF (just the facts): Co-published in 2023 by Mousse Publishing (here) and Pato em Pequim (here). Softcover, 22 x 27 cm, 240 pages, with 192 color reproductions. Includes a short story (in English/Portuguese) by the artist and an expanded colophon by Post Brothers. Design by Ana Baliza. In an edition of 700 unique copies. (Cover and spread shots below.)

Comments/Context: Nearly all the photographs in João Maria Gusmão’s pleasantly thick and tactile photobook Massa Confusa document a single subject – the artist’s own collection of traditional Japanese-inspired chawan tea bowls, each made by the ceramicist Victor Harris. These handmade bowls are typically used in the tea ceremony, where matcha is carefully prepared with precise attention to process, rhythm, and gesture, often in a small room or space purposefully designed for the activity. The calm whisking of the tea provides an extended moment of attentive tranquility, and the entire process of preparing and drinking the tea is an introspective and meditative ritual, reaching back centuries in time.

Given the nuanced craftsmanship exhibited in Harris’s bowls, we might have assumed that Gusmão would document each one with a squared off, frontal rigor, making it easy for us to see each one, to notice (and celebrate) its particular aesthetic qualities, and then compare it to the many others, perhaps in grids or arrangements of images, like a museum catalog or inventory. But a quick glance at the exuberantly colored spreads above makes it clear that this isn’t at all what Gusmão decided to do.

The understated grace of imperfection lies at the heart of Harris’s ceramics, each one an artistic exercise where subtleties of form are matched with choices of glaze and enamel. The resulting objects are fired in the intense heat of the kiln, and emerge with their own unique glossy, crackled, mottled, or smoothly irregular patinas, the elements of touch, intention, and chance mixing in unpredictable ways.

Gusmão’s color photographs of the bowls wholly embrace this sense of unpredictable mystery in the artistic process, via his own series of steps and techniques that encourage intentional imperfection in his images. Gusmão begins by making large format exposures of the bowls in simple tabletop setups; these unique direct-to-paper prints (as paper negatives) are then hand developed in the darkroom using various chemical washes, rinses, and painterly splatters, often taking advantage of eccentricities of filtered exposure, flares of light, and unexpected combinations of processing. His “photo reversal chemigrams” are energetically layered, with the representational forms and surfaces of the tea bowls seeming to dissolve into something even more loose, organic, and abstract.

At first glance, Gusmão’s swirling images of tea bowls seem to share many of the qualities of expressive darkroom improvisation found in the works of Daisuke Yokota and Mariah Robertson, but his underlying logic is somewhat different, and perhaps less inherently non-representational. The texts in Massa Confusa (including a short story by the artist) center around the “science” of alchemy, and of efforts to develop a process of transmutation that would chemically transform an amalgam of substances (the “chaotic mass” of the title) into a primal material that held within it all potential elements. In particular, this elusive “philosopher’s stone” was said to provide a way to change base metals into gold, and to create an elixir that would offer immortality.

The ideas of tea brewing, ceramics making, alchemy, and analog darkroom photography are all swirled into Gusmão’s thinking, turning his straightforward documentation of tea bowls into something altogether more mystical and experimental. His pictures (and supporting texts) seem to readily embrace the serendipitous connections across his various areas of study, pushing him to test the typical aesthetic limits of photography. In the most extreme of his images, the ostensible subject of the tea bowl seems to have entirely disappeared, as if subsumed into the rhythms of the messy chemical flow.

In photobook form, Gusmão’s images are presented as large scale reproductions, two to a spread, with just a small amount of white space surrounding the photographs; the resulting tea bowls (when visible) are larger than life sized, making both Harris’s choices of shape and texture and Gusmão’s processing washes and chemical interventions more pronounced. As the pages turn, the vessels wander by in a surreal parade, with drips and splotches mixed with tonal reversals, edges washed into flat brightness and underneath areas lost to colored shadow, and crackled glazes matched by wispy overlapped fogs and hazy glows. The colors drift and shift almost continuously from image to image, from seething orange and ghostly blue to dusty pink and simmering lime green, the “murky chromatic flux” waving in and out like the ebb and flow of the tides. Each bowl offers its own personality, which is then brashly interrupted by Gusmão’s interventions, with a few random inclusions (a left boot, a pinewood plank, a bottle of carpenter’s glue, some sheets of marbled paper, a cracked mobile phone) breaking up the flow just a bit and reminding us of the artist’s interpretive presence. Massa Confusa has then been constructed in a manner that reshuffles the image order from book to book, making each copy unique in terms of its arrangement and spread sequencing, and adding yet another layer of chance and randomness to an already irregular set of aesthetic re-combinations.

In the end, Massa Confusa is a seductively mysterious photobook object, one where each page turn offers yet another tumultuous churn of colors and nesting of interpretations. I can certainly image a single print from this series, or perhaps a grid of four prints hung together, placed in some quietly unadorned space and offering a sense of meditative calm to whoever might stop for a moment to dive into the visual eddy. The individual works are both tantalizingly simple and unexpectedly complex, with implied moods and approximate atmospheres of surging color and form drawing us into open-ended aesthetic encounters – in short, the photographs invite us in and leave us to think, before slipping away with similarly fleeting fluidity. But it is this shifting transient quality that will likely bring me back to this book again and again, that sense that I will likely see something different the next time I flip through its pages.

Collector’s POV: João Maria Gusmão is represented by Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York (here) and Sies + Höke Galerie in Düsseldorf (here). His photographic work has little secondary market history at this point, so gallery retail likely remains the best option for those collectors interested in following up.

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Read more about: João Maria Gusmão, Mousse Publishing, Pato em Pequim

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