Saving the tree

All the world's a stage for Sugito, or so you could be forgiven for thinking with a passing glance at his work. Drawing on the Japanese tradition of nihonga, a formal and spatial painting style developed in response to Western painting in the late nineteenth century, many of Sugito's paintings begin with a stage, apparently shakily drawn with a pencil. He gradually introduces other elements into the structure to create a slow-burning tension that quietly but insistently questions the role of painting as object and painting as a site. Not unlike the work of Agnes Martin, areas are left deliberately blank, but these 'empty' zones of ethereal colour are loaded with meaning: they are sites of potential or real destruction and disaster.

This contrast between the gentleness of his palette and fine painterly definition with the almost childlike imagery of war and disaster (minute burning towers, battleships, army planes and even outer space) that make Sugito's work so fantastical and fascinating. When seen in reality, up close, it is apparent that these surreal and riveting compositions are held together by the paint surface itself-not just the acrylic but by the dry pigment that he painstakingly applies to the canvas, which can produce in the viewer a hallucinatory and strangely calming effect.