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Artwork Description

With evocative paintings that call to mind the luscious colours of Rothko, yet at the same time imbuing them with the intellectually dark timbre of Richter, the abstract canvases of the young Kentaro Sato awaken emphatic memories of nature and the inner spirit. Today, we observe an emergence of a new generation of Nihonga artists who have pushed the genre in a new direction, using techniques and motifs that brim with progressive innovation. Sato is one such youthful artist who is helping to propel Nihonga into vistas previously unseen. The resulting paintings are inner landscapes that call to mind the traditions of Western abstract expressionism, yet with a uniquely Japanese aesthetic. Sato is unique in that he focuses predominantly on the ancient technique of “tarashikomi”, a medieval technique of blotting powdered minerals with water that was devised by the legendary Momoyama painter Tawaraya Sotatsu (b. 1570 – d. 1640). Often used for accentuating certain colours or motifs within figurative compositions, it is rarely, if not ever, used within the entirety of a painting as its immediate subject. Instead, Sato takes this technique and uses it as his muse, thereby creating soaring, abstract expressionist landscapes of the night sky and the heavens above in luscious blacks, blues, greens and reds from various natural stones and minerals that have been ground into powder form, then moved across his Japanese paper using copious amounts of water that freely flow upon his surfaces like ocean waves. His new series “Wall of Wind”, however, also uses the power of the wind to serendipitously move Sato’s inks and minerals across the surfaces of his paper, thereby creating enignmatic worlds that could not be achieved simply through the use of water.