Where: Hespe Gallery
Duration: Nov 1, 2014
- Nov 30, 2015
The fifteen
oils on canvas by Hiroshi Sato comprising "Windows and Doors" depict
domestic interiors in a contemporary realist style, i.e., illusionistic but not
photographic. Patchwork grids of color applied with slightly differing
brushstrokes, for example, depict off-white walls parallel to the picture
plane. Sato’s subjects are young women, alone, engrossed with tasks, and
illuminated by nearby windows. Similarly introspective paintings by Vermeer,
Hopper and Wyeth spring to mind, but also the thematic ancestor represented in
countless Renaissance paintings of the Virgin Mary, seated in a room, reading,
with the light streaming through the window representing the Holy Spirit.
While
the stillness and interiority (both physical and psychological) look back to a
more reflective time, small details — pop-up books, model airplanes and cars,
and toy motorcycles, all childhood enthusiasms of the artist — add a contemporary
counterpoint.
In
“Corner,” a woman dressed for entertaining (short black dress, tulle sleeves)
sits in a corner, entertaining herself with a pop-up book, surrounded by her
reflections in a nearby window, TV screen and mirror. In “Window Side" we
glimpse, through sliding windows, from outside, another woman who is reading in
profile, her face reflected in a mirror. “Frame Side” presents a rear view of a
woman seated at a table before a window, with the view outside ‘overexposed’
into patches of yellow and tan; an empty frame placed on a red chair leans
against the wall. “Pop-up Book and Bowl,” “Brooker’s Table,” “Little Red Riding
Hood” and “Chairs in a Corner” depict intensely observed objects of childhood
fascination and fantasy set within domestic-interior stage sets, object-dramas
without human viewer surrogates.
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