MISA ATO

Éloge du vide

Biographie

Misa Ato studied architecture in Montpellier and practiced for 27 years. In 2017 he abandoned his profession and started to work in black and white photography. While developing a practice called "classical" he studies a photographic approach "out of the ordinary" on the interweaving of the plane, the form facing the medium.
Marked by architecture and attracted by painting, he seeks in the singularity of objects, places and landscapes, the point of metamorphosis that make them tip over into a visual universe. Like entropies of architecture to imagine. The between, the edge, the limit, the unoccupied, the space and the emptiness are his tools and come to obstruct the photography.

Personal Exhibitions
Exhibition "Anatomy of the void" Cultural Center, Vauvert, April - May 2023
Exhibition "Urban Topology" Les Agapes, Paris, January - February 2023
Exhibition "Impermanence of space" Allègre les Fumades, December 2022 - February 2023
Exhibition " Urban Topology " Gazette café, Montpellier, October - November 2022
Exhibition "In Visibles" Bar à Photo in Montpellier, January 2021 - February 2021
Exhibition " Abstractions " Art Center Château de Caladroy, August - September 2020
Exhibition "In Visibles" at Espace 14 in Nîmes, December 2019
Exhibition "In Visibles" at the Temple of Saint Sébastien d'Aigrefeuille, September - October 2019

Publications
Fisheye Magazine n°48 - Portrait of Misa ATO Illustrated by a photograph from the Zaha Hadid Archives, July 2021 OpenEye Magazine N°20 - Today's look at photography, Anatomy of the void, March 2021
Square Magazine Revue de photographie contemporaine - Portfolio, November 2020
Niepcebook n°14 contemporary photography magazine - Interview and portfolio, August 2020
Cover photo of a poetry magazine "Nègre Blanc" Volume 5, November 2019

Présentation

L’« Éloge du vide » is an exhibition built around four black and white photographic series by the Montpellier artist Misa ATO. The series have in common to question, to explore the place and the games, of voids and lines in architecture, as a formal and plastic game, but also as places of memories, vestiges of the past.
The first series, « Anatomie du vide », explores the straight lines of the built environment. Between emptiness and fullness, shadow and light, black and white, a harmonious balance emerges. For another series, « Impermanence de l’espace » Misa ATO is inspired by the Japanese wabi-sabi, which places impermanence, randomness as an aesthetic principle. Through her vision, the artist underlines the poetry of urban constructions considered ordinary, on which we usually linger little. The series "In Fractions" represents architecture in the form of fragments and questions what remains of the former occupants as a way of evoking oblivion, memory, the ephemeral, the durable, abandonment and becoming. The fourth series, "Issue 21", is composed of images in which the artist plays with the illumination of abandoned places, like vestiges of what was once revealed.
An installation of 43 giant mikados links these photographic series. It represents the ambiguity of the work of the artist who manipulates the constructed and deconstructs it.
"Eager to question our perception of space, I claim my intervention on the medium by giving volume. It is not a question of simulating the subject but of putting into perspective the construction plan, the composition of the scene or the place photographed." Misa Ato