Tsutomu Sasaki

Lives and works in Sendai, Miyagi, Japan

Artist statement

The Place of the In-Between – Non-Identity in Painting In recent years, I have used the phrase The Place of the In-Between as a title for my works. It refers to an ambivalent phenomenon that emerges on the pictorial surface through color, brushwork, and layers of paint. For me, painting is a process in which seeing and touching continually oppose and transform one another. Looking at a painting creates distance, while painting involves touching the surface and causing that distance to disappear. Images are bound to memory and therefore always appear as a present that has already passed—the past tense of the present. By contrast, the physical act of engaging directly with paint and canvas remains within the reality of the “now.” To paint without depicting an object, to erase while imagining an image, to allow past and present to coexist: painting emerges through states that exist simultaneously while remaining irreconcilable. The Place of the In-Between is a field of non-identical tension that arises from the attempt to hold together multiple states that cannot be reduced to one another. It is also an attitude of sustaining relationships among contradictions, differences, other people, and complex realities without immediately reducing them to a single meaning or framework of understanding. Within this tension, I continue toward an identity that can never be fully realized. This impossible desire unsettles perception, renews relationships, and drives the process of making....

Artwork