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Lot Essay
Bloodline_JMB is a dramatically distorted portrait of Jean-Michel Basquiat, created in the unique and immediately recognisable style of the Japanese artist Makoto Saito. Exquisitely rendered with apparently multi-layered pools of vibrant colour flowing into each other, Saito blurs and alters the image's original outline, creating a hazy representation. For Saito, the painting is based upon the way images stored in the unconscious memory are recalled to the mind in a vague manner, fuzzy and imprecise in a ghostlike vision.
Painted in 2009 at a pivotal moment in his career, Bloodline_JMB was made just after Saito had his first large-scale solo exhibition in Japan at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa. Initially a graphic designer, Saito was world-renowned in the industry for reshaping the field in Japan. He then turned his immensely talented eye to the discipline of painting, investigating the act of 'seeing.' In doing so, he created a distinctive artistic style that he referred to as 'digital painting.' Bloodline_JMB is an example of this, showing how Saito deconstructs contemporary life as though it were seen through the filter of digital technology. This is all prevalent in modern life, as Saito explained 'society today constitutes a single thread of digital and natural elements, and I can't tell which side I'm standing on, back or front.' (M. Saito in Makoto Saito Scene [0], Tokyo, 2008, p. 12).
Painted in 2009 at a pivotal moment in his career, Bloodline_JMB was made just after Saito had his first large-scale solo exhibition in Japan at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa. Initially a graphic designer, Saito was world-renowned in the industry for reshaping the field in Japan. He then turned his immensely talented eye to the discipline of painting, investigating the act of 'seeing.' In doing so, he created a distinctive artistic style that he referred to as 'digital painting.' Bloodline_JMB is an example of this, showing how Saito deconstructs contemporary life as though it were seen through the filter of digital technology. This is all prevalent in modern life, as Saito explained 'society today constitutes a single thread of digital and natural elements, and I can't tell which side I'm standing on, back or front.' (M. Saito in Makoto Saito Scene [0], Tokyo, 2008, p. 12).