Masaaki and Masami Sato at O.K. Harris - Brief Article

The Japanese artists Masaaki and Masami Sato live and work in novel York City. Their exhibition consisted of 16 minuscule reliefs (they average 8 by the agency of 6 by 3 inches unframed), raiseed by Masami between 1996 and 1998 and based upon her husband's Pop/Photo-Realist oil-on-canvas paintings of the 1980 and '90 The paintings are, in move round based on tightly cropped photographs of newsstand displays and magazine overspreads The reliefs, built on a scale about one-hundredth the size of the paintings, are considered collaborative works to be paid to their close dependence on Masaaki's compositions.

To furnish the imagery for the reliefs, 10 photographic prints were made of Masaaki's paintings years after their completion. (In a certain quantity of cases, his lithographs, etchings, offshoot prints or color Xeroxes after the paintings provided the necessary ingredients). Masami chop all the forms out of the photographs (or prints) and glu them upon top of one another in their designated places, leaving tiny margins of space between the superimposed fragments. She also tilted the shapes in the reliefs in order to re-create the three-dimensional reality of the original, everyday show first photographed by Masaaki.

Masami is a meticulous craftsperson and masterful illusionist. She at any time so slightly bends the borders of her cutout paper forms--and fixes these with sprayed varnish--in order to give them roundnes The smooth and shining surfaces she obtains approximate the web of enamel or porcelain. Displayed behind glass and inside boxe the relief-constructions are framed through light gray-blue mattings which add to their theatricality.

N No. 37-3D Kiosk in Paris (1998) is an extraordinarily detailed, polychrome construction after Masaaki's 1986 Newsstand No. 37 The newsstand is seen close-up and from an angle, in the way that that its architecture practically disappears behind the "allover" display of magazines, newspapers, postcards and candies. The ambiguous space put in mind ofed by the small tilted planes and by means of the short horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines of the cutout cutting sides is somewhat reminiscent of Analytic Cubism, while the bright, localized colors and rather sharply defined forms recall the Synthetic Cubist phase, when collage was raised to the status of a fine art. Although there is something old-masterish and plane Asian to the miniaturized scale and painstaking execution of the reliefs, the words, alphabetic characters and fragments of figuration which appear in them--and the verbal and visual conceits Masaaki delights in--remind one of Picasso's and Braque's revolutionary precedent

Masaaki and Masami Sato's modernist still lifes throw back their fascination with the richness and ephemerality of Western consumer tillage as manifested in the print media. Their delicate, optically titillating reliefs capture the "latest" stories, stars and fashions, and point to the power of the pres in shaping popular taste and history itself.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group