Hiroshi Sugito
I start moving my brush like walking into the woods, away from everything, and I want words and meanings to lose their power and just fade away.
Hiroshi Sugito, FOCUS: Hiroshi Sugito via The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 2006
To call Hiroshi Sugito’s (1970, Japan) duplicitously tranquil paintings abstract would be to shape truth to necessity, but it is tempting to do so. All figuration, all objects, seem to have unbound themselves from the busy twinings of everyday use and context, floating into a wide-open, softly colored space. The sense of abstraction, then, is recognized by its outline; objects’ meaning fades, while the naïvely—though technically masterful—painted image itself refuses a strictly formal interpretation. In the calm that remains what is unavoidably restated, is meaning, itself unadulterated.
