MA

MA. In Japanese culture, MA manifests as a perfect relationship between emptiness and fullness—a peaceful tension that highlights the distance between elements and a pause in time. It is the empty spaces that represent the sky, lakes, and mountains; moments of suspension that offer the viewer the highest level of concentration and grant those who traverse or inhabit them the chance to interpret and experience sensations from elsewhere.

These MA are tributes to the mountains and to the gaze that, while tracing the skyline of the peaks, gets lost in the void. The same void that, five hundred years ago, captivated Leonardo da Vinci and drove him to meticulously sketch the Prealps of Lecco, observing them from the roof of Milan’s Cathedral.

By seeking to reconstruct that perspective and layering it with a personal one, it became possible to replicate it in painting, allowing for the serene claim that those mountains also belong to those who observe them daily upon returning home. They are the same mountains of familiar walks, between lake and peaks.