GALLERY 1

Kikuo Saito:
Hatching Color

Fri. 9 Sep. - Sun. 18 Dec. 2022

Saito's larger paintings emerged from his drawings, which he treated like scaled-down maps to future landscapes. Nature and its charting play a role in this grouping of works from the final years of the artist's career, and though he only numbered the drawings, the titles he gave to the paintings are mischievously specific: Agber might be a city in Nigeria, or a corruption of the Catalan Agbar; Cala Branca mixes the Portuguese Branca with Cala Blanca in Menorca; while Tilla could be Tila, a name shared by locations in Chiapas, Mexico, Uttar Pradesh, India, and Nepal. As cartographies of the placeless or unplaceable, these works evoke Hachure -- the term of art for the cross-hatched lines that indicate gradient and orientation on antique relief maps. The more closely-spaced these parallel strokes, the steeper the terrain, and conversely, as the strokes come loose again, the topography flattens. But while mapmaking hatching is essentially black-and-white shading, Saito turns the technique into an exploration of color -- a joyous discovery of the countless new colors that can be hatched from the crossing of lines.