Looking at Kikuo’s paintings makes me think about how many colors exist within light. Colors appear differently depending on the amount of sunlight present, and the perception of colors can vary depending on your mood or the temperature of the day. Without light, color doesn’t exist.

“White is also a color,” Kikuo casually said once, and it sounded fresh to me, who had grown up with certain preconceptions about color. Sky blue or blood-like red are just examples of the many stereotypical images that colors can be associated with. No matter the expression, the descriptions of colors are beautiful. In Japan, the phrase the color of a crow’s wet wings is used to describe the beauty of a woman's black hair.

I wonder what colors Kikuo brought with him from Japan? Maybe it was the color of the clay and glazes used in Raku pottery, the color of the robes of the monks walking through the temple gardens, or perhaps the color of the kimono Kikuo’s mother, Kimie, wore on their last trip to Kyoto together.

It was the advice of Clement Greenberg, an art critic with whom Kikuo was close in the 1970s-90s, not to lean too much towards shibui, or subtle, delicate, wabi-sabi colors that were latent inside him, a nature determined by his culture, being born in Japan and living there until he was more than 20 years old. This advice stayed in Kikuo’s mind, and he did make an effort to avoid this. However, he did not reject the wabi-sabi colors completely, trying different colors as if dressing them in a kimono.

Behind the paintings I can always see Kikuo squatting like a child on the floor of his paint-covered studio, dissolving paint every day, muttering, “The important thing is color. Can I create a color today that has never been seen before?” His sense and use of color is outstanding and unique, and seems to be his own long-held challenge to Color Field.

–Mikiko Ino Saito