Hiroshi Sato - Artist Statement

I feel that what I am doing as a representational painter today, is a form of fan fiction based on past representational paintings, created by an individual with a fragmented perception of culture.

Having been born in Japan and growing up in Tanzania, East Africa, my perception has been rooted in the very fact that I have a fragmented and inconsistent understanding of cultural references. My personal knowledge of Japanese culture is like a book only read underwater, while my memory of African culture appears only as a hologram. Rather than attempting to finding the order of the two in clear fragments, I am interested in the vagueness. Combine this with my perception of art and aesthetics as being forged of a convoluted mix of western and eastern art, and we arrive in my personal interest in exploring the areas of references vs pastiche, recreation vs fiction and culture vs memory in my work.

By believing the genre of representational painting as being inherently referential, I believe it can communicate multifaceted fictional narrative that changes in its own unique way while orbiting a common totem. I believe the most interest lies in between this representation and fiction.

I use a similar basic structure to Vermeer, in which I use paintings and objects in the scene to allude to a set narrative. Each painting, contains paintings, posters, objects, gestures of other artists that I am referencing. For a viewer who recognizes some of the references, they would be able to experience a different impression of the painting in comparison to another viewer who do not recognize some other references, allowing each viewer to actively participate in the malleable interpretation of one piece.

The painting process itself attempts to echo my interest in perception by altering what I am painting from. Traditional representational painting would work from life, contemporary representational artist use photos. Each past series used different references, for example, I have used miniature 1/12 scale models for my 2016 series Fan Fiction, or another series constructed mostly from memory.  My latest work uses 3D computer generated environments as physical references.

I use flat geometric shapes and form based mark making to create a simultaneous contrast between flatness and illusionistic space. This is intended to physically echo the duality of fiction and representation.