Patricio “Pato” Ysasi (born 1995, Mexico City) is a Los Angeles-based photographer and filmmaker whose work explores the intersection of photography, film, and text. His strong visual-poetic sensibility is both formal and lyrical, with a melancholic appreciation for the fleeting beauty of life. Ysasi’s use of filmic sequences or repetitions of stills and text push at the structure of narrative and explore the relationship between film and photography (both dealing with memory and time).
Named after the island Naoshima—a metaphor for the spiritual desolation of modern life—this series creates a compelling portrait of everyday life in Japan, filled with nuance, solitude and meditation. Naoshima draws inspiration from Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Il Deserto Rosso. Antonioni believed that our inability to adapt to the new industrial rhythms of life had resulted, “in a dangerous imbalance in our psychological and spiritual nature.” Naoshima was inspired by the “desolate beauty of his composition – the balanced geometry framed within shots, and pale color palette”.
