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Lot Essay
“How can a reflective, responsible artist invent a tradition,” mused Damián Bayón, the eminent Argentine art critic, “and be himself at the same time that he is exploring the frontiers of thematic and optical innovations? That is the question that has to be asked in the exemplary case of Kazuya Sakai" (quoted in “Three Moments of a Single Admiration,” in Kazuya Sakai: Paintings, Constructions, Reliefs, 1976-79, San Antonio, The Marion Koogler McNay Art Institute, 1979, n.p.). Bayón and Sakai met in Buenos Aires in the 1950s, and their close friendship endured through collaborations on Plural, the influential literary magazine published in Mexico City in the early 1970s, and teaching positions and exhibitions in Texas in later years. Born in Argentina to Japanese parents, Sakai completed his education in Japan and returned in 1951 to Buenos Aires, where he worked as a translator, radio host—he was a great aficionado of jazz—and writer. A self-taught artist, he belongs to the emergent generation of abstract painters both in Argentina—among them José Antonio Fernández-Muro, Sarah Grilo, and Miguel Ocampo—and in Mexico, where he landed in 1965 following a two-year stay in New York. His work responded to Pop aesthetics and color-field abstraction, and by 1971 he embraced what he called “hard-line painting” (línea dura), characterized by vibrant, optical colors and curving geometric forms. Following his appointment as the Edward Larocque Tinker Chair in Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin in 1976-77, Sakai permanently settled in Texas and taught at the UT campus in Dallas (1980-97) over the remainder of his career. The Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City organized a major retrospective of his work, Kazuya Sakai en México, 1965-1977: pintura, diseño, crítica, música, in 2016.
Sakai’s move to Texas saw creative progressions within hard-line abstraction, his work taking on new, sculptural qualities of movement and space. “Sakai’s painting these last few years has consisted primarily of nucleus-circles around which bands of color coiled and uncoiled,” wrote Bayón in the catalogue that accompanied Sakai’s solo exhibition at The Marion Koogler McNay Art Institute in San Antonio in 1979. “But now this world of clockwork perfection has experienced a revolution that seems small but may lead to much greater developments,” he continued:
In effect, anyone looking carefully at Sakai’s current work will discover that many of those ‘nuclei’ tend to disappear and are now suspected more as an outline, as a negative space that is revealed ‘by an absence,’ if I am allowed to use that expression. This empty space, in turn, manifests itself because the bands of color in question underline it, in other words, the phantom circles make them twist or drift in directions that are no longer just straight lines or curves (or straight lines connected with curves) but rather directions that, at first glance, appear to be totally free.
The dynamism of Sakai’s work is “not a matter only of ‘untying the previous knots’—as he sometimes says,” Bayón explained of these recent constructions. “There is a structure that has been conscientiously prepared and later erased. This is done in the same way that an architect erases the reference lines when his project comes to life in the real and definitive buildings, a building which he had in his mind in the form of an idea.” In these reliefs, Bayón concluded, “Sakai wants to create floating bands moving in a more atmospheric, more transparent space” (ibid.)
The Sky of Texas epitomizes this evolution of Sakai’s practice, its multiple and shaped canvases occupying a position between painting and sculpture and proposing infinite possibilities of movement and orientation. A riff on the famed “big sky” of Texas, the work imagines shifting and kaleidoscopic horizon lines, the bands of dazzling color variously framing and bisecting a dark blue ground. An expansive installation, the work distills the magnitude and wonder of the sky through pure color and shape; each panel captures a discrete sensory moment, from the prismatic flash of light to the celestial brilliance of the night sky. The staggered arrangement of the panels intensifies the work’s immersive atmospherics: shaped triangles, squares, and rectangles slant toward and away from the viewer, rendering the enormity of the Texas sky through a phenomenal gestalt effect. The Sky of Texas was featured in an exhibition of the same name, held at the University of Texas at Dallas in 1981, and anticipated the Sky series of prints from the mid-1980s, which emerged from Sakai’s first experiments with computer-generated art. “Here we have the real chance to do things unthinkable in other places,” he declared upon his arrival in Dallas. A modernist and an innovator throughout his life, Sakai never lost belief in the transcendent power of art. “Art is a part of our spiritual life,” he affirmed. “The arts give joy, communicate feeling and can help people better understand themselves" (quoted in L. Michel, “Kazuya Sakai in Texas,” Athenaeum Review 4, 2020, 78-9).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
Sakai’s move to Texas saw creative progressions within hard-line abstraction, his work taking on new, sculptural qualities of movement and space. “Sakai’s painting these last few years has consisted primarily of nucleus-circles around which bands of color coiled and uncoiled,” wrote Bayón in the catalogue that accompanied Sakai’s solo exhibition at The Marion Koogler McNay Art Institute in San Antonio in 1979. “But now this world of clockwork perfection has experienced a revolution that seems small but may lead to much greater developments,” he continued:
In effect, anyone looking carefully at Sakai’s current work will discover that many of those ‘nuclei’ tend to disappear and are now suspected more as an outline, as a negative space that is revealed ‘by an absence,’ if I am allowed to use that expression. This empty space, in turn, manifests itself because the bands of color in question underline it, in other words, the phantom circles make them twist or drift in directions that are no longer just straight lines or curves (or straight lines connected with curves) but rather directions that, at first glance, appear to be totally free.
The dynamism of Sakai’s work is “not a matter only of ‘untying the previous knots’—as he sometimes says,” Bayón explained of these recent constructions. “There is a structure that has been conscientiously prepared and later erased. This is done in the same way that an architect erases the reference lines when his project comes to life in the real and definitive buildings, a building which he had in his mind in the form of an idea.” In these reliefs, Bayón concluded, “Sakai wants to create floating bands moving in a more atmospheric, more transparent space” (ibid.)
The Sky of Texas epitomizes this evolution of Sakai’s practice, its multiple and shaped canvases occupying a position between painting and sculpture and proposing infinite possibilities of movement and orientation. A riff on the famed “big sky” of Texas, the work imagines shifting and kaleidoscopic horizon lines, the bands of dazzling color variously framing and bisecting a dark blue ground. An expansive installation, the work distills the magnitude and wonder of the sky through pure color and shape; each panel captures a discrete sensory moment, from the prismatic flash of light to the celestial brilliance of the night sky. The staggered arrangement of the panels intensifies the work’s immersive atmospherics: shaped triangles, squares, and rectangles slant toward and away from the viewer, rendering the enormity of the Texas sky through a phenomenal gestalt effect. The Sky of Texas was featured in an exhibition of the same name, held at the University of Texas at Dallas in 1981, and anticipated the Sky series of prints from the mid-1980s, which emerged from Sakai’s first experiments with computer-generated art. “Here we have the real chance to do things unthinkable in other places,” he declared upon his arrival in Dallas. A modernist and an innovator throughout his life, Sakai never lost belief in the transcendent power of art. “Art is a part of our spiritual life,” he affirmed. “The arts give joy, communicate feeling and can help people better understand themselves" (quoted in L. Michel, “Kazuya Sakai in Texas,” Athenaeum Review 4, 2020, 78-9).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park