Yasuto Masumoto, born in Hiroshima, Japan, is opening his first solo exhibition in Portugal at Vera Cortês Art Agency. Masumoto, who recently participated in the exhibition 'Everything but the word?...' in Instituto Camões, Lisbon, as resident artist at the Independent Study Program of the Maumaus School of Visual Arts, produced a collection of works based on his observation and negotiation of ourselves as social being. The works will occupy several of the agency's spaces.
In this exhibition, the drawings showing excerpts of animated films (or rather, that were used to construct the animated film), organized into diptychs and triptychs that may look like parts of the storyboard, also evoke the space between two successive frames, the mechanism of cinema, underscoring a reflexivity towards his artistic practice that another video, filmed in the gallery, further investigates.
The film shows an imaginary meeting of 8 faceless men in a garden in Lisbon. We are presented with the absurd circumstance of a discussion around the different disposition possibilities of a paperweight with the shape of a wooden bird, created by the Danish designer Kristian Solmer Vedel. The body and head assemblage can be positioned in several shapes.
The video filmed in the venue shows the artist together with the agency owner and her assistants (one of them participating actively in the videotaping), 'negotiating' the organization of some carefully packed art works by the agency's artists in the store-room.
Using video, animation and drawing, each work is presented as an independent piece and, at the same time, as a component of a larger installation. This is how the artist establishes relationships and creates meanings for the Lacanian notion of incomplete identity, continuously established and (re)invented through social interactivity, that is to say, by our constant choices of indifference, hostility or friendship towards the other.

Jürgen Bock (director of Maumaus, independent curator)