Kikuo Saito, known both as an abstract painter with a remarkable sense of color and as the creator of evocative, wordless theater/dance pieces, died on February 15, 2016. He is survived by his wife Mikiko Ino. Born in Tokyo in 1939, Saito came to New York in 1966. He had already begun to design stage settings for modern dance in Japan, and would continue to do so in the US. When he first arrived, however, he went to work as a studio assistant for such eminent artists as Larry Poons, Kenneth Noland, and Helen Frankenthaler.. Saito continued to design for the theater and dance until 1979, working internationally with some of the most innovative directors and choreographers of the period. Drawing on Japanese theatrical traditions of Kabuki and Noh plays, Saito pioneered the use of water and other untraditional materials on stage. In addition to productions for the Festival of Two Worlds, Spoleto, Italy, he created settings for numerous plays at La Mama, New York; collaborated with Robert Wilson on projects in Shiraz, Iran, and in Paris; and created the set for Peter Brook’s “Conference of the Birds,” in Paris. Enthusiastic supporters of this gifted young Japanese man included choreographer Jerome Robbins and the founder of La Mama, Ellen Stewart – who described herself as “Kikuo Saito’s mother in America.”

Despite his growing reputation for his stage work, Saito became dissatisfied with the complexity and the collaborative nature of designing for the theater. Even before he completely abandoned theater projects, he increasingly concentrated on painting, developing a personal version of Color Field abstraction that depended as much on delicately inflected lines and edges as it did on expanses of seductive, saturated hues. Saito’s mature work is characterized by its inventive, often surprising use of color, ranging from frankly gorgeous, richly varied intensities to subdued near-monochromes–as well as by its eloquent drawing. His paintings seem to negotiate a tense coexistence between Marshall McLuhan-esque “cool” and passionate individuality – perhaps a metaphor for Saito’s dual existence, over the years, in the collaborative world of the theater and the private world of the studio. He began to exhibit his paintings in 1976 and since then, has participated in numerous solo and group shows in the U.S., Europe, and Japan. He is represented in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, and numerous private and corporate collections.

In 1996, Saito returned, briefly, to the theater, when he was artist-in-residence at Duke University. Collaborating with his wife, the dancer and choreographer, Eva Maier (who died in 1997), he created the narrative concept, costumes, and sets for “Toy Garden,” a wordless, haunting performance involving students from Duke’s dance, drama, and art departments. (“Toy Garden” was later performed at La Mama.) The piece, loosely inspired by John Ruskin’s writings on Venice, was, more specifically, Saito said, about what he imagined was happening in the missing half of Vittore Carpaccio’s celebrated “Two Venetian Women on a Terrace,” a work whose amputated left side has long been lost. The long snout of an ambiguous dog cropped by the painting’s edge generated a delightful iguana costume – the dancer stretched out on a low, wheeled platform – while Carpaccio’s women’s ample costumes and the birds perched on the railing became a generous cage-like wire skirt, filled with doves. A similar stint at New York’s La Guardia High School of Music, Art, and Performing Arts, in 2001, produced “Ash Garden,” a meditation on Pompeii and its fate.

These theater works resonated in Saito’s paintings. As his work matured, gesture, in many forms, became more and more dominant, without overshadowing his orchestrations of ravishing hues. After working on “Toy Garden,” these gestures became increasingly calligraphic. The works that followed included everything from energetic sweeps of a loaded brush and delicate lines to declarative stenciled Roman capitals, and a lot in between, some of it almost or completely illegible. Many of these mysterious scrawls proved to be shorthand, recontextualized versions of Saito’s conceptual drawings for costumes and characters, while the elegant Roman capitals, arranged at intervals on a grid, had their origins in the backdrop of “Toy Garden.” In the same way, the subdued palette of “Ash Garden” had cognates in the paintings that followed. The largely unreadable calligraphic elements of all of Saito’s work of his last two decades, however, can be seen as expressive of more deeply embedded experience. It’s perhaps not an overstatement to say that when we, as viewers, attempt to come to terms with Saito’s invented calligraphy, now plainly visible, now veiled by layers of paint, we recapitulate the artist’s youthful experience of arriving in New York and being confronted by a new language and a new alphabet. The sensuality of Saito’s color and the physicality of his paint handling could be equivalents for his pleasure in overcoming those challenges.

In addition to being artist-in-residence at Duke University and La Guardia High School, Saito was also a visiting professor at Musashino Art University, in Tokyo, and taught, until weeks before his death, at the Art Students League. He was an inspiring teacher whose students remained deeply attached to him, even as they established themselves in careers such as architecture. They form an extended family of adult surrogate children, further expanding the legacy of this notably modest, dazzlingly gifted man, whose multivalent abilities left their mark in many different disciplines. Kikuo Saito will be much missed.

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Witty. Elegant. Playful. Subtle. Comical. Frontal. Multi-faceted. Confrontational. Friendly. Thoughtful. Forthright. Singular. Incremental. Alive. I made this rather erratic list in Don Porcaro’s studio during a prolonged encounter with the works in this exhibition. Inspired by a conversation with Porcaro about his family’s heritage, I jotted down the Italian word prepotente – roughly “self-important” – a response, I suspect, to the insistently animated, “look at me” quality of Porcaro’s vertical assemblages of slices of colored stone. And then there’s our awareness of both the unified form and the physicality of Porcaro’s recent constructions–the dry stoniness of the layered limestone and marble. Each of his exquisitely crafted stacks of delicately varied hues has as much personality and eccentricity as an idiosyncratic individual. Spending time with Porcaro’s upright sculptures we begin to feel as if we’re at a party with a crowd of lively, extravagantly dressed guests. The notably different tops of each of the sculptures can appear as inventive hats and the often hilarious feet on some of the most refined of them suggest that these uprights might just scuttle off if our company doesn’t hold their attention. But soon Porcaro’s ability to invent expressive masses claims our attention—we begin to think about his suavely articulated volumes in relation to Constantin Brancusi’s ravishingly pared-down, eloquent forms and the party chatter quiets down.

This double reading of Porcaro’s sculpture is obviously what triggered the wide-ranging list of words that introduced this essay. It’s also an important aspect of what makes his work so compelling. His earlier polychromed pieces combining stone, metal, concrete and paint were unabashed fusions of the grotesque and the toy-like, conflations, as the artist has said, of “the monster and the child;” confronted by these sculptures, whether “life-size,” knee-high, or scaled to the hand, we began to wonder whether we had stumbled into Hieronymus Bosch’s world of sinister hybrid creatures or a particularly sophisticated aisle in F.A.O. Schwartz. Porcaro’s emphasis on stone in his recent work has expanded his vocabulary of allusions, to some extent because of the character of his chosen materials. The exuberant polychromy of his earlier sculpture not only helped bring his inventions to life, but it unified disparate materials and the variety of textures allowed us to read his complex composites as singular, albeit multi-colored, vivacious objects. Yet we also remained aware of color as an addition. Porcaro began to concentrate on the chromatic and textural possibilities of a palette of stone in 2011 when he was working on a project in Slovenia investigating the range of hues available in Croatian marble. He liked the way the variations of delicately colored stone allowed him to seamlessly integrate chroma, texture, and mass. At the same time he created substantial vertical forms by stacking slices of limestone and marble that permitted him to create volume with an additive, improvisatory approach similar to that of his earlier mixed-media constructions.

While no less animated than his “Boschian” mixed-media creatures, Porcaro’s recent stone sculptures seem, at least initially, to be slightly more solemn in their associations, while retaining the sense of multiple readings that has traditionally been characteristic of his work. We are struck first by the singularity of the forms, by the way these unignorable objects loom up before us, occupying our space and demanding our attention. Yet we are also soon aware of the multivalent character of those singular forms. We note the many layers of stone, each slightly different in hue and surface, that make up the unified masses. We begin to think both about the process of accumulation and about natural stratified rock formations, while, in part because of the generous scale and verticality of these sculptures, we think, as well, about classical architecture. The swelling, upward thrust of Porcaro’s recent works suggests the way the columns on Doric temples are modulated to correct for optical distortion. Yet, at the same time, Porcaro being Porcaro, the undulating profiles of his upright sculptures, tapering to narrow tops, recall nothing so much as personable robots; or for those of us who spent childhood rainy days in the antique libraries of summer houses, we recall the tightly corseted society ladies of a certain age or caricatured butlers in satirical New Yorker magazine cartoons of the 1920s. The contrasting sinuous shapes and textures of the sculptures’ tops, assembled from many different sources, intensify the sense of personality and individuality. Porcaro refers to them as “caps,” “heads,” or even “a hookah.” He courts these varied connections, deliberately intending both to ground and to enliven his works by means of what he calls “a kind of reference.” The combination of tapering forms and the narrow edges of the sliced stone provokes still other associations—the elongated necks of the African tribal women whose traditional dress includes stacks of necklaces, for example. Porcaro says, too, that he wants the sense of compression that image elicits; it’s yet another component in the notable animation of his constructions.

Even when Porcaro ventures into more conceptual territory, as in the engaging Cabinet of Nomads, 2015, an installation of a multiplicity of small, colored forms elevated on legs and arranged on shelves, each individual part is as charged as any of his larger works. This sculpture is a new iteration of an earlier concept that had its origins in Porcaro’s concern with the steadily growing population of the world. Now, the work has been reconfigured both to represent both the troubling rise of displaced people world wide and to celebrate the United Nations. The many components that carry the symbolic weight of the sculpture are intimate in size, suggesting that, like toys, they could be picked up and handled. Yet for all their playful overtones, they are also, like all of Porcaro’s works, thoughtful, self-contained, and self-referential. Cabinet of Nomads is confrontational. We feel held accountable for something, even if we’re not quite sure what it is. This kind of multivalence is why Porcaro’s sculpture not only draws our attention but also holds it. At a moment when art is often over-explained or loaded with irony, his work asserts that serious ideas, both aesthetic and otherwise, can be presented by purely visual means, with wit and humor, without compromising either seriousness or wit. That’s both valuable and important.

Karen Wilkin is a New York based independent curator and critic.

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