The Tree Is Here, Still, in Pure Stone
M+M Gallery is pleased to present The Tree Is Here, Still, in Pure Stone, a group exhibition that brings together three artists—Yuichi Inoue, Tommaso Spazzini Villa, and Thomas Hutton—each working across different cultural and historical contexts. Through materially driven practices, the exhibition explores how physical matter becomes a point of entry into deeper inquiries about human behavior, collective memory, and our evolving relationship with nature and history. From Inoue’s gestural inscriptions of spiritual intensity, to Spazzini Villa’s reanimation of cultural lineage through rare books, and Hutton’s architectural meditations on empire and time, the show traces distinct yet interconnected paths of mark-making across modern and contemporary art. It proposes culture as a living process—one of reciprocal interpretation and embodied translation.
The exhibition opens with Daitsuchushobatsu – Verse of the Lotus Sutra (1963) by Yuichi Inoue, a major work from the height of his career. Deeply rooted in his family’s generational devotion to the Lotus Sutra, Inoue’s practice was shaped by Buddhist and Zen philosophies from an early age. In this piece, gold pigment flickers against black paper like the lowered gaze of a Buddha in an altar niche. Its quiet, meditative presence reveals Inoue’s move beyond traditional calligraphy toward a profound engagement with time, space, and memory. In his work, language ceases to function merely as communication; instead, it becomes a vessel of bodily force and perceptual tension, broken apart and reassembled with intent.
Trees and stones—symbols of resilience and continuity—serve as metaphors for cultural foundations that endure and evolve. Artists, like roots probing beneath the surface, seek out what history has left unsaid. Thomas Hutton reflects on his use of travertine, a stone quarried in Tivoli and used in Roman imperial monuments such as the Colosseum and St. Peter’s Basilica. This tradition continued through the Baroque period and was later revived by Fascist architecture in the 20th century to evoke imperial glory. Today, the same stone is used to clad the lobbies of skyscrapers in Shanghai. Travertine, then, is not just matter but a bearer of political and historical memory. Empires rise and fall like tides, their splendor lingering as a murmur in the dust, still shaping contemporary cultural imagination.
This perspective finds resonance in Tommaso Spazzini Villa’s Radici series. Working with rare antiquarian books—such as a 16th-century edition of Orlando Furioso, a 17th-century Dao De Jing, and an 18th-century manuscript of the Bhagavata Purana—Spazzini Villa transforms these objects through collage and incision. Upon their fragile pages, he draws intricate root systems, evoking the branching, shifting trajectories of culture across languages and geographies. His work speaks to the way meaning mutates across contexts, and how cultural narratives are continually reborn through displacement and reassembly.
Both Spazzini Villa and Hutton are based in Rome, a city steeped in layers of historical sediment. Spazzini Villa’s academic training informs a practice attuned to the entanglements of nature, history, and visual language. Hutton, meanwhile, draws directly from Rome’s architectural materials, particularly the palimpsestic qualities of plaster and travertine. Though differing in material, both artists examine how time inscribes itself upon objects. Hutton’s stone has witnessed the rise and fall of empires; Spazzini Villa’s paper has yellowed under the slow abrasion of centuries. These materials become vessels of memory and temporal density—a form of “material history” that invites renewed consideration of the ties between matter, time, and place.
The Tree Is Here, Still, in Pure Stone unfolds through a curatorial language of both poetry and precision. It reveals how three artists, through distinct material vocabularies, summon the latent energies of history, memory, perception, and language. From Inoue’s radical engagement with the essence of writing, to Spazzini Villa’s reconfiguration of cultural roots, and Hutton’s architectural excavations of the past, the exhibition opens a space for thought shaped by the physical world. The viewer is not merely an observer, but a participant—resonating with history, conversing with culture. M+M Gallery invites viewers to perceive, in subtle and often invisible traces, how culture inscribes itself in the present in nonlinear ways—taking quiet root, and beginning to grow.
