Kikuo Saito:
Cloud Paintings

9 Sep. – 19 Dec. 2021

Kikuo Saito's work can best be grouped not by period but by style; throughout his life he made paintings that can be regarded as series: the Color Field Paintings, the Theater Paintings, the Alphabet Paintings, and so on. But the Cloud Paintings represent a unique departure: Saito painted only sixteen of them, in and around 1993, and they remain his most mysterious achievement. Each Cloud Painting features a central “cloud” of color, or of black (the absence of color), above or below a marginal line or daub that seems to demarcate a horizon. These features, along with the individual titles that Saito gave the works, might suggest that the "cloud" is something else entirely: a rock, an island viewed from above, a ripe fruit hanging from a bough, a moon or planet or exploded star.  

Ultimately, the enigma of the Cloud Paintings evokes the enigma of clouds themselves: those moving collections of vapor that appear and disappear, blow in and away, merge and fade out above us, while we attempt to impose figurative identity on their mutable forms, endlessly questioning their shape-shifting. If these paintings are about anything, they're about these very questions, and, by extension, the immemorial human need to make nature recognizable.

Kikuo Saito, Green Ladder II, 1993, acrylic on canvas, 82 ½" x 57 ½"