Kikuo Saito: The Wrong Side of the Brush

The Wrong Side of the Brush brings together six paintings, five of them made between 1977 and 1978, and a single one — the blue one, Blue Ladder — made in 1987. The medium is acrylic on canvas kept raw, without gesso, a technique favored by Saito that puts his work into direct conversation with that of Helen Frankenthaler, who also often preferred to paint onto — to paint atop — an unprepared ground. These raw canvas patches or pools enframed by playful color became a hallmark of Saito’s acrylic style of the period, but this intimate grouping of canvases is unified by a more subtle procedure, namely the use of the brush’s handle, “the wrong side of the brush,” to drag lines — squiggly lines, slashing lines — through the background color. The result suggests the fundamentally abstract nature of craquelure, a network of rips, tears, and seams abraded and coming loose — lines along which light might enter the painting and illuminate it from within.