Neither Here Nor There: Dynamic Art in Growth & Decay

Rob Sato is a Los Angeles based painter, illustrator and comic book artist who recently finished his second solo show at the Corpo Gallery in Santa Monica, CA. The name of that show was “The Open End”. Sato’s paintings are something to marvel at: His subjects are in a perpetual state of motion, moving forwards and backwards, decaying while still working, destroying and building up. It all happens almost seamlessly — in Sato’s own words they are “neither here nor there.”

Besides marveling in Sato’s artwork, we’ve also had the pleasure of getting inside the artists head as this interview given before his previous Corpo show reveals. In this interview with the Erratic Phenomena from August of 2010, you really get an idea of his interests, world view and where pieces of his inspiration come from. Ultimately, you learn there is a method to his madness.

“Gathering the research and mulling it over took much longer than executing the painting. Reading World War II history,    particularly material on the horrible sad mess of the Pacific Theater, was the main research done for “Future Passed” … Japanese war planes were gathered into a big pile and set on fire by American forces … The atmosphere exudes peace, laziness, surreal ordinariness … while the amazing machines of a tyrannical empire lie in ruins, piled in a heap like trash. The victors, who, no question, should have won, are ignorantly, pointlessly smashing things that could have been saved for posterity.”

See “Future Passed” directly below, and more of his artwork at robsato.com.