Makoto Saito @ Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo - “After Watching the Tove Jansson Documentary. – Song of the Forest" Exhibition

Makoto Saito 

“After Watching the Tove Jansson Documentary. – Song of the Forest – ”

Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo (complex665)

November 16 - December 14, 2024

MAKOTO SAITO

“Floating Troll”, 2024

Oil on canvas, 163 x 215 cm

© Makoto Saito

MAKOTO SAITO

“Song of the Forest”, 2024

Oil on canvas, 163 x 215 cm

© Makoto Saito

Taka Ishii Gallery is pleased to present “After Watching the Tove Jansson Documentary. – Song of the Forest -,” an exhibition of the work of MAKOTO SAITO. The artist second solo show at the gallery will feature approximately six new paintings.

Makoto Saito is known for portraits of artists such as Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, and Antonin Artaud in which their faces appear haunted by insanity, made by transferring computer images onto canvas with a brush as if breathing life into digital data. This process involves dissecting and reconstructing faces on the computer to create intricate dot-matrix blueprints.

With their vivid colors and organic shapes, the new canvases featured in this exhibition mark a radical departure from his previous style and a shift toward abstraction. Inspired by a late-night viewing of a documentary about Finnish artist and writer Tove Jansson, and nostalgic memories of reading Nordic folk tales of trolls and goblins to his daughter, Saito conceived images of forest spirits coming to life, which led to this new body of work.

The various trolls and goblins in these paintings, rendered in highly abstracted colors and shapes against backgrounds that resemble a dim, mysterious Scandinavian forest, appear to coalesce through a process of recurring division and fusion. They are analogous to coacervates (small amoeba-like spheres of proto-cellular organic material) believed to have been the first life forms in the ancient oceans. The folds and cracks of the paint recall the metabolic functions propelling life forms’ growth, which developed over the course of evolution, while also evoking the rugged, uninhabited surface of a desolate planet, juxtaposing microscopic and macroscopic scales. Saito speaks of his great excitement at witnessing phenomena akin to the emergence of life unfolding on his canvases.

In Saito’s previous works, meticulously created from blueprints over great lengths of time, each stage of production was governed by the artist’s precise intent. In contrast, his latest works appear to celebrate the spontaneity of placing embryonic forms on the canvas and observing their natural development. The paint responds to its surrounding environment, such as the underlying layers or neighboring colors, undergoing unexpected changes and weaving myriad visual narratives both large and small. We invite you to wonder at the emergence of spirits in these pulsating, dynamic works.

MAKOTO SAITO was born in 1952 in the Fukuoka Prefecture, and currently lives and works in Tokyo. His major solo exhibitions include “Makoto Saito －Criticality－,” Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art, Fukuoka, (2019), and “MAKOTO SAITO: SCENE [0],” 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa (2008). His works are housed in the collections of numerous museums in Japan and overseas including San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa; and the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

TAKA ISHII GALLERY TOKYO

complex665 3F, 6-5-24 Roppongi, Minato-ku, Tokyo 106-0032

www.takaishiigallery.com

Makoto Saito @ Acquavella Galleries, Palm Beach - in Time E.H.

Makoto Saito: in Time E.H.

Acquavella Galleries, Palm Beach

April 14 - May 28, 2023

Acquavella Galleries presents its first solo presentation of works by the renowned Japanese artist MAKOTO SAITO. On view at Acquavella’s Palm Beach location, in TIME E.H. features twelve new and recent paintings inspired by the noted American artist Edward Hopper, marking the international debut of this body of work.

Makoto Saito’s deep interest in Hopper’s oeuvre goes back nearly forty years, to when he first saw Hopper’s painting House by the Railroad (1925) at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Compelled by Hopper’s ability to capture the American ethos of the early 20th century, and by the narrative qualities of his paintings, Saito began exploring this series a decade ago, and only recently returned to transcribe the works onto canvas. In these paintings, Saito extrapolates Hopper’s world into his own, conceptually merging the timelines of the two, transcending temporalities.

“As I gazed at [Hopper’s] works, I found my consciousness and body naturally enter the paintings, enabling me to musingly journey through time and space as if in the world of science fiction,” says Makoto Saito. “Hopper’s paintings are so lonesome to the extent of sheer melancholy. They evoke an air of solitude regardless of whether people are depicted there or not, yet at the same time they speak to me as if every piece has its own story.”

Makoto Saito’s process is both painstaking and arduous. It involves producing countless hand-painted dots to mimic the printing process, culminating in scenes that are at once structured and ethereal. The artist deconstructs Hopper’s iconic paintings through his use of pointillism, which he employs as a method of engagement with the world within the painting itself. At close range, the subject is indiscernible—only the small dots that comprise the image are visible—yet as one moves further away the composition coalesces as one of Hopper’s scenes, which he then alters through changes in scale and color and also intervenes with his own painterly passages.

In his exploration of Hopper’s oeuvre, Makoto Saito frequently revisits the artist’s most iconic paintings as starting off points for his works. Shadow (2022) is instantly recognizable as an interpretation of A Woman in the Sun (1961, Whitney Museum of American Art), Hopper’s painting of a nude woman staring out the window of an empty apartment. Saito’s rendition, which utilizes his signature pointillist technique in shades of blue, is decidedly reticent, with pieces of the original composition lost to a void that fills the center of the frame. The same phenomenon is seen in Office (2022) and Bed (2022), which reference Hopper’s Office at Night (1940, Walker Art Center) and Excursion into Philosophy (1959, Private Collection), respectively. In these paintings, Saito brings to the fore the loneliness, emptiness, and melancholy characteristic of Hopper’s worlds. In additional paintings, Saito omits aspects of Hopper’s larger composition to explore the minutiae of a scene.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue including an introductory essay contributed by the artist.

Born in 1952 in Fukuoka Prefecture, Japan, MAKOTO SAITO lives and works in Tokyo. His major solo exhibitions include Criticality, Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art, Fukuoka (2019), and MAKOTO SAITO: SCENE [0], 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa (2008). His works are housed in the collections of numerous museums in Japan and elsewhere, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa; and the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

ACQUAVELLA

340 Royal Poinciana Way, Palm Beach, FL 33480

www.acquavellagalleries.com