By Koichi Sato
Setting changes everything. Truly, the space around us often informs the way we perceive the input we’ve encountered, whether it be sights, sounds, smells or sensations.
Placing emphasis on setting, the Bortolami Gallery’s Artist / City initiative explores the spaces outside its New York gallery to bring stimulating artworks to unlikely locations. The latest iteration, “Koichi Sato, Susumu Kamijo, Jonas Wood / Las Vegas,” filled the inoperative Greyhound bus station at Plaza in November, offering uniquely Las Vegas-inspired paintings that play with their surroundings.
Created in collaboration, the work displayed in this unusual gallery explores the artists’ perceptions of Las Vegas but with great care taken to consider location. According to the galley’s website, “The exhibition allows for a recontextualization of each artist’s paintings, removed from the major art centers in which they work, within a space previously animated and defined by its use. As a former bus station, the exhibition venue can be understood as a crossroads—a center of exchange.”
Depicting lively characters with bright grins, Japanese artist Koichi Sato explores the myriad people who pass through the transportation hub while simultaneously offering his own perception of the city. With vibrant colors and detailed patterns, Sato’s work conjures classic Vegas energy with a sense of fun-loving humor.
Starkly contrasting Sato’s work, Japanese artist Susumu Kamijo’s images take a more abstracted approach, featuring the artist’s signature poodle portraits. Using large fields of color, scratchy graphite lines and negative space, Kamijo’s designs are an interesting counterpoint to Sato’s artworks.
By Jonas Wood
American artist Jonas Wood adds Japanese garden landscapes to the gallery, with specific consideration given to space. The texture found within Wood’s landscapes plays with the nearly chaotic nature of Sato’s works while also providing a sense of serenity in the collection. Also utilizing negative space, Wood’s work balances the arrangement.
While these paintings could easily take home in fine art galleries across the globe, they so clearly belong in the old bus station. Wood, Kamijo and Sato appropriately treated the bus depot as a place of convergence, and in doing so created art that interacts with the space and with each other’s work.
The free exhibition is open through March 4.
Plaza, bortolamigallery.com
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