Matazo Kayama - Deer (鹿)

This etching belongs to Matazo Kayama's investigation of the animal motif as pure line. A herd of deer is not described so much as woven: bodies, necks and legs dissolve into continuous parallel strokes that behave like tendrils, leaf veins and running water, so that the boundary between animal and plant is deliberately left open. The plate is worked almost entirely in fine hairline engraving, with the open tone of the plate itself carrying the light. Kayama, trained in Kyoto and the son of a Nishijin textile designer, spent the 1960s onward fusing the decorative logic of classical Japanese painting with Western construction and printmaking technique, a direction that earned him the label of a modern Rinpa master. This impression is a hors commerce proof outside the numbered edition, hand-signed in pencil by the artist at the lower right and annotated H.C. at the lower left, with an embossed hexagonal blindstamp pressed into the lower left of the sheet. It is presented in a wooden frame with a cream mat and a gold inner fillet, and retains its plain cardboard outer box and yellow cloth pouch.