Kazumasa Mizokami - Recent Exhibitions

Saturday, November 15, 2025 / The personal exhibition

Thoughts Between the Hands

G. Gianetti Ceramics Museum / COE Foundation.

Via F. Carcano 9, Saronno (VA) Italy

Curated by Mara De Fanti.

Exhibition catalogues / Critical text in the catalogue by Ivan Quaroni.

Thoughts Between the Hands

Kazumasa Mizokami’s art springs from an intimate and poetic impulse that finds its three-dimensional expression in terracotta. His is a process that transforms thought and feeling into a concrete form which Elena Pontiggia, with a precise formula, defined as “sculpted painting.” His works are, in fact, the product of a sort of operative meditation, an exercise in attention that implants the visual idea into the material with the same naturalness as a seed finding its soil. His gesture is simultaneously plastic and pictorial, because every modeled form is also meticulously painted with a unique and recognizable chromatic sensitivity, which has become one of his distinctive hallmarks.

Not only does Kazumasa shape delicate forms and figures—almost moving in their startling simplicity and naturalness—but he also clothes them in dreamy colors, soft hues, and delicate shades, expressed in gentle pastel gradations.

The iconographies are diverse yet circumscribed: floral and vegetal, as in the case of his recurring Calendars or his Seeds; mineral, like certain fanciful Meteors; aerial, like the curious clusters of clouds resembling buds; and, finally, human, like those of his lyrical characters, always absorbed in silent contemplation or amazed before the miracle of nature.

Kazumasa models these forms by treating clay as a living substance, a sensitive material charged with memories, upon which he applies color with a delicacy reminiscent of tempera painting. The tones that envelop the plastic forms create a sort of perceptual field in which the sculpture seems to come alive. In Kazumasa’s production, colors play a primary role and contribute to creating that suspended and rarefied atmosphere upon which his lyrical grammar is founded. Works such as The Wind that Brings Memories (2025), How Are You? (2019), and Girl Walking on Flowers (2006) capture the enchantment and astonishment of daily moments, transforming them into pure elegy.

Nature, which constitutes the artist’s main source of inspiration, is never traced in a pedestrian manner; it is always reinvented (and understood) through the filter of an attentive and respectful poetic sensitivity. Kazumasa imagines a different relationship between man and nature, based on balance and mutual understanding. Men, women, flowers, butterflies, cats… they are all part of an ideal universe, more just and equitable than the one we usually know. It almost seems that through his sculptures, paintings, and drawings, the artist suggests a different way of interpreting existence, closer to the innocent gaze of childhood. Perhaps this is why certain inventions of his sometimes recall children’s creations (as in the case of certain color tests) or evoke a wondrous and fairy-tale imagery, inhabited by magical creatures like the SingingTree (2021) and scattered with flowers that reflect The Light of Sunset (2013) and reproduce The Sound of the Woods (2015).

Kazumasa’s nature is germinal and virescent, where buds, corollas, leaves, pistils, stamens, and petals of radial flowers proliferate. These sometimes resemble the stars of Nicola De Maria, yet more often form an original and imaginative florilegium that finds no counterpart in the more prosaic botanical classifications.

Kazumasa invents terracotta herbaria to mark an interior time, as he does with his recurring Calendars—small gardens for contemplation, mental meadows that serve to remind us of the beauty of life, rather than the inexorable passing of years. In Calendar of January 27th (2024), December 17th (2020), or November 29th (2019), the artist creates a sequence of idyllic blooms that shatter the linear conception of time, transforming every date into the beat of a circadian and natural rhythm—the same one that regulates the physiological functions of all living organisms.

But there are not only flowers in Kazumasa’s inventory. The artist is also the author of a bizarre Index Seminum, a collection of seeds cataloged by color—from The Orange Seed (2022) to The Light Blue Seed (2022)—and displayed in curious heaps of tapered and globular structures.

The tendency toward reiteration and the repetition of differentiated forms is a constant in Kazumasa’s work. He often creates veritable sample collections of figures, as he does with his imaginative meteors, each accompanied by the tempo and expression annotations of musical scores. Examples such as The Meteor (vivace), The Meteor (ardente), The Meteor (precipitando), The Meteor (andante), and The Meteor (mosso) bear no resemblance to what remains after the atmospheric impact of an asteroid colliding with Earth. Certainly, like true meteorites, they are extraterrestrial forms, but only in the sense that they have no equivalent in the natural morphology of our planet. The same can be said of another work, Blue that Imprisons Time (2022), where the temporal dimension seems to collapse into an anomalous and vibrating cluster of matter, the extroverted and International Klein Blue version of a gravitational black hole. The Night Falling from Memory (2024) is, instead, a more intimate reflection on time and its inevitable fading, which the artist represents by associating memories with an ephemeral flowering, with the fragility of bouquets of pansies, which in no way resemble the plants of the Violaceae family.

On the other hand, in Kazumasa’s world, natural elements and forces are rarely consistent with reality. They often possess unexpected shapes and contours. They are epiphenomena of parallel universes springing from his imagination. Such is the case for H2O (2018), where the chemical formula of water takes the shape of a spiral of blue flowers, something we can associate with a marine vortex only by analogy. And so it is for Metamorphosis (A Woman’s Hair), a work from 2013, which appeals to the observer’s ability to see beyond the visible and produce poetic associations, moreover explicitly suggested by the title. Conversely, in The Sense of Gravity (2007-2020), we find one of his typical “little blue men” (another recurring form in his production) holding an electric lightbulb—an allegory of the idea, a luminous metaphor of embodied thought and, at the same time, of the vital principle that animates matter.

In this constellation of images, some act as symbolic nodes of particular intensity in which the artist’s entire poetics is condensed. The Cheerful Light on the Face (2017), for example, is the clearest representation of the perceptual joy that runs through his sculpture, the shard of a world where matter seems to shine from within, transforming into luminous energy. In The 741 Strength (2007), a title that enumerates the polygonal holes traversing the spherical surface of the sculpture, the terracotta assumes a greater density, becoming a solid body similar to a geode with a regular morphology.

The sky, the empyrean, and the celestial vault are constant references in his works, along with everything that traverses them. They are supernal places, further spaces toward which to turn one’s gaze, as does the little blue man in The Sky (Airplane Contrail) (2024), or from which descend cirrus and nimbus clouds of strange fashion. This happens in The Cloud in the Mountains (2025), where water vapor condenses into the rarefied form of a quadruped grazing on an alpine peak. Or as in the surprising cumuliform mass of The Night Cloud (2019), a compact and irregular agglomeration of rounded volumes recalling the configuration of Craspedia globosa flowers.

In all of Kazumasa’s works, one perceives the search for a balance between the perception of the real and the imaginative faculty, between phenomenological truth and pure invention. The Magic (2013), for example, is a drawing in which real and imaginary vegetal forms merge into an image that transforms the vision of the everyday into an experience of wonder. The female figures of Red Woman (2000 and 2007) and Bright Red Girl (2013) are, instead, models of an ideal humanity, expressing a more contemplative and harmonic vision of nature.

One may even think of the Pensieri tra le mani (Thoughts in One’s Hands) body of work as a kind of poetic and spiritual path, an itinerary populated by silent presences, each corresponding to a fragment of consciousness within the artist’s visual imagery. An imagery that inscribes the human subject within a vast natural order, a progressed and evolved cosmos, finally emancipated from barbarism.