KEIKO SAKAMOTO

Keio Sakamoto is a painter who incorporates printed fabrics from all over the world into her paintings to recreate brilliant glimpses and memories of ordinary scenes from her travels.

Sakamoto’s calling card is the use of strips of printed fabrics—often with floral designs—pasted onto the surface and on top of her already-finished painting. These fabrics represent foreign cultures, but the use of a mass-produced fabric alongside the medium of figurative painting also creates a dissonance that both elevates the former and democratises the latter. Tensions like these are a hallmark of Sakamoto’s practice. As she says, she wants to “instill in viewers the feeling of being in a permanent state of limbo.”

Sakamoto often uses plunging perspectives and dramatic light-dark contrasts, and she is an expert colourist who does not shy away from vivid and pastels colours. There is a delicate balance with the garish and sometimes fluorescent coloured printed fabric, especially when viewed from afar causing the fabric to melt into and become part of the painted surface. Yet, the contrasts between the physical properties of the cloth with opaque, glossy oil and acrylic paint draws the viewer in. Sometimes, the painting beneath the cloth is faintly visible. The perspective can be intensified by the cloth, or it can be broken by it. She treats both mediums equally and takes enormous care with the selection the cloth and the placement of it on the painting; in fact sometimes, no fabric is used, and other times, the entire surface is covered.

Sakamoto’s subject matter comes from trips she makes, which she refers to by the Japanese word “shuzai” meaning “to report on something” in the way used by the media. However, what she is reporting on is not an objective reality, but her own subjective state of mind. She says she is highly conscious of her “outsider” status when she visits these off-the-beaten path locations, and as a whole, each series represents a unique take on local art. There are no landmarks or recognisable tourist spots, and people are seldom represented. The works have a tangible loneliness that every traveller feels but is reluctant to mention, and there is an honesty in the scenes that she as a traveller finds most fascinating but local people would have little interest in, whether it be the humble dwellings of the locals, wide open spaces, or places she treats as near-abstract colour-fields. Furthermore, although the paintings appear as landscapes, they are painted from memory, and—more importantly—feeling. Rather than landscapes, Sakamoto thinks of paintings as “spaces.”

One such shuzai was to the district of Mae Rim in Thailand where she visited in 2009. Without representing any of the usual motifs associated with Thailand, there is instead a true feeling of ourselves being the “other,” heightened by the portions that are literally covered up by the cloth.

Sakamoto has joined exhibitions at following musumes and institutions:
Torrance Art Museum, Los Angeles (2011)
Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music + National University of Singapore Museum (2008)
Fuchu Art Museum, Tokyo (2005, 2006)

Text by Ruben van Mansum