GALLERY 1

Kikuo Saito:
The Alphabet Paintings

3 Jun. - 4 Sep. 2022

When Kikuo Saito arrived in America in 1966, his most immediate challenge was alphabetical: the so-called Roman letters arranged in their series from A to Z, whose rearrangement into words comprises the power of expression. The city's English fascinated Saito, and his initial fluency in this new language privileged the graphic over the phonic, and even over the semantic: what mattered to him, above all, was how the letters looked, as if their sheer forms bore sucient meaning, their shapes embodiments of the very yearning to communicate. A cursory "read" of Saito's "Alphabet Paintings" immediately suggests this interpretation: that the artist was seeking to translate himself and his early experiences of linguistic confusion onto canvas. But stand in front of these paintings long enough, until the failure to comprehend becomes the injunction to see, and the true significance of Saito's achievement comes into focus: these paintings, which the artist made throughout his career, are autobiographical abstractions, playful commentaries on a polyglot city, which was built by immigrants, and laid out on a grid, all of it connected by the acronymed mass-transit lines, whose trains and buses are marvels of grati. New York, Saito's adopted home, is supposedly a city in which numbers -- dollars -- reign supreme, and yet in these paintings, the artist is asserting the democratic claim of letters to the language of the streets, drawing on stenciled signage and pasted-up posters; billboards, chalked menus, black-and-white newsprint set in orderly columns, and marquees whose colors are most vivid in the night, when, in the absence of natural light, they're quite literally electric.