Hiroshi Sugito at Nicole Klagsbrun - Brief Article

Nicole Klagsbrun's first exhibition in her fresh Chelsea location presented works (all from 1998) by the agency of Hiroshi Sugito, a young Japanese artist whose delicate colors and diminutive figures indicate both sophistication and naivete. Among the best pieces in the present to view is dance, a small image made of thin layers of acrylic and brushed-on free from moisture pigment (a technique, often used by the agency of Sugito, which gives a fragile, pulverulent texture to his surfaces). A proscenium space, framed through curtains and overhung by a paper doily collaged onto the cotton support, is stage to a ring of dancing animals, greatest in quantity dressed in human clothes, which look to have popped off the page of a children's volume They are tiny and, like the stained and irregular surface upon which they dance, they appear to fade in and without of clarity as if recalled from a place reaching far down within memory.

This consequence shows up again in in the cage, a large canvas which not aways the same stage set, on the other hand now with a gridded background suggestive of bathroom tiles. upon the grass-green field are minuscule airplanes, a child, a house and tree all in like manner tentatively rendered that one must search without their contours the way single searches one's mind for details of a long-past event

The other large works exhibit a slightly different approach in which Sugito looks less interested in evoking distant memories of childhood fantasy than in trying to work directly from the position of the child. In bird man, a bizarre, feathered creature with windows for organ of sights is attacked by tiny jet planes and rocket ships, barely delineated in colored pencil. The violence of the pageant suggests the imaginings of a nine-year-old stripling inventing King Kong dramas, on the contrary the artless quality is belied by means of the utter sophistication of the pale and translucent colors, and by the agency of the sensuously delicate surface, which is made up of a grid of rice paper laid above the canvas support.

In pyramid tower, a vast mound covered with architectural details is attacked by means of gnatlike fighter planes. Here, as in bird man, scumblings of r paint standing for explosions in the celestial expanse interrupt the smooth, stained surface of the canvas. It is impossible to separate this childlike fantasy from the art-historical referent--Twombly--inevitably evok by means of the combination of staining, drawing and scumbling. One's faculty of perception that Sugito's charming innocence is all too studied modifys the pleasure his work otherwise affords.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group