Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, there is something deeply disturbing in the universe of Izumi Kato (1969). His creatures with empty eyes, who observe us from their canvases and pedestals with an unsettling intensity, inhabit a liminal space between two worlds. These are not simply artistic figures, but presences that confront us with our own strangeness, our deeply ambiguous nature as beings both natural and artificial.
While contemporary art often loses itself in sterile conceptual games, Kato’s work strikes with its telluric force, its visceral authenticity. His embryonic creatures, neither fully human nor completely other, carry within them an existential charge that transcends their apparent simplicity. They bring us back to something fundamental, archaic, while being resolutely anchored in our present.
I cannot help but think of what Martin Heidegger called the “unveiling of being” when I find myself facing these anthropomorphic figures. These beings, with their bulbous heads and tapered limbs, confront us with the very essence of what it means to exist in a world where technology has taken over our primitive connection to nature. Kato’s decision to paint directly with his latex-gloved hands, rejecting the mediation of the brush, resonates deeply with the Heideggerian critique of modern technique as an obstacle between man and his authentic relationship with the world.
This tactile approach to creation is not just a simple technique among others. It constitutes the very foundation of his artistic practice, a method that allows him to establish direct, almost shamanic contact with matter. When Kato applies paint with his fingers, it is not simply about creating effects of texture or matter. It is an act that is almost ritual, a way of conjuring presences through physical contact with the canvas.
Kato’s practice also fits into a reflection that echoes Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s theories on the phenomenology of perception. His camphor wood sculptures, where chisel marks remain visible like so many scars on their surface, remind us that our relationship with the world is primarily corporeal, tactile, embodied. The marks of his fingers on the canvas, the visible joints of his sculptures, all participate in this aesthetic of direct contact that characterizes his work.
What particularly interests me in Kato’s work is that it creates a subtle and complex dialogue between tradition and contemporaneity. Originally from Shimane Prefecture, a region of Japan where Shinto animism remains deeply rooted in local culture, the artist draws from this heritage while radically reinventing it. His creatures are not traditional yokai, but rather manifestations of a contemporary spirituality seeking to reinvent itself in a disenchanted world.
Kato’s use of materials is particularly revealing of this tension between old and modern. Take for example his soft vinyl sculptures, created from 2012. This material, typically used in toy manufacturing, becomes in his hands the medium of an expression that evokes primitive idols. There is something deeply troubling about these figures that seem to emerge from an immemorial past while being manifestly produced by our industrial society.
This duality is also found in his way of treating space. Kato’s recent installations create environments that function as contemporary sanctuaries. When he suspends his creatures from the ceiling, as in his striking exhibition at Perrotin Gallery New York in 2021, he transforms the gallery space into a ritual place where his floating figures become the officiants of a ceremony whose codes we do not know. It is precisely in this tension between the sacred and the profane that his work finds its greatest strength.
The artist pushes this exploration of our era’s contradictions even further through his use of found materials. The stones he collects near his studio in Hong Kong become elements of composite sculptures where raw matter dialogues with contemporary textiles. These assemblages create unexpected bridges between the natural world and the industrial universe, like totems for our Anthropocene era.
In a particularly striking work presented during his exhibition “LIKE A ROLLING SNOWBALL” at the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Kato combines a raw stone with synthetic textile to create a figure that seems to emerge from a space between worlds. The stone, a primitive element par excellence, is transformed by its association with industrial fabric, creating a visual tension that perfectly summarizes the paradoxes of our time.
The artist’s deliberate choice to leave his works untitled is not insignificant. It forces us to abandon our categorization reflexes, to confront directly the enigma of their presence. These nameless creatures look at us with their empty eyes, inviting us to an encounter that happens beyond language, in a space where words lose their power of definition and control.
This strategy of the unnamed participates in a broader approach that aims to maintain the work in a state of maximum openness. Kato’s figures resist any definitive interpretation, they float in a space of indeterminacy that makes them all the more powerful. As Robert Storr, the curator who discovered his work for the 2007 Venice Biennale, pointed out, these works possess an “abrasive” quality that distinguishes them from usual Japanese artistic production.
I cannot help but see in this approach a fascinating parallel with Walter Benjamin’s thoughts on the aura of the artwork in the age of mechanical reproduction. Kato’s creatures, even when produced in series like his vinyl sculptures, retain a mysterious aura that defies mechanical reproduction. Each seems to carry within it a unique presence, irreducible to its materiality.
This presence is particularly palpable in his large canvases where figures seem to emerge from an abstract background like apparitions. The frequent division of the canvas into distinct chromatic sections creates complex mental spaces where creatures seem to float between different states of consciousness. This pictorial strategy evokes Gilles Deleuze’s reflections on Francis Bacon’s painting, an artist whom Kato cites among his influences.
The artist’s recent works show a fascinating evolution of his practice. The figures gain in structural complexity without losing their primitive force. The assemblages of various materials create hybrid beings that seem to physically embody the contradictions of our time. This complexification of his plastic language is accompanied by an increasingly sophisticated reflection on the nature of image and representation.
In his latest installations, Kato explores new ways of activating space. His creatures are no longer simply objects to contemplate, but become actors in a mise-en-scene that transforms the exhibition space into metaphysical theater. The plays of shadow and light, the arrangement of works in space, all contribute to creating an immersive experience that plunges us into a parallel universe.
The artist also develops an increasingly sophisticated reflection on the notion of series and variation. His figures, though always recognizable, undergo subtle metamorphoses that make them oscillate between different states of being. This systematic exploration of formal possibilities recalls Morandi’s research on still life, but transposed into a fantastic and unsettling register.
What makes Kato’s work particularly relevant today is that it makes us feel simultaneously our alienation and our deep connection with the world around us. His creatures are like distorting mirrors that reflect back to us an image of our humanity that is both familiar and foreign. In a world where technology promises us disembodied transcendence, Kato obstinately reminds us of our condition as embodied beings, attached to the earth by mysterious bonds.
The recurrent use of organic materials like wood and stone, combined with industrial elements, creates a fertile tension that resonates with contemporary ecological concerns. Kato’s creatures seem to carry within them the memory of a pre-industrial world while being resolutely inscribed in our technological present. They remind us that we ourselves are hybrid beings, products of a long natural and cultural history.
There is something in Kato’s work that fiercely resists the temptation of nostalgia. His creatures are not vestiges of an idealized past, but living presences that challenge us here and now. They remind us that the primitive is not behind us but within us, that the sacred has not disappeared but transformed, and that our task is not to find a lost purity but to invent new forms of relationship with the world.
This prospective dimension of his work is particularly evident in his experiments with synthetic materials. Soft vinyl, for example, is not used ironically or critically, but as an authentic material that carries its own expressive possibilities. Kato manages to give it unexpected dignity, transforming it into a medium for a new form of sacred adapted to our time.
The artist’s most recent installations push this reflection on our relationship to the sacred in a desacralized world even further. By creating immersive environments where his creatures seem to inhabit space like spectral presences, Kato invites us to rethink our relationship to the invisible and the mysterious. These spaces function as contact zones between different dimensions of reality, places where the everyday and the mysterious meet and mutually contaminate each other.
The strength of Kato’s work lies in its ability to maintain these different dimensions in tension without ever resolving them in an easy synthesis. His creatures remain enigmatic, resisting any attempt to reduce them to a single meaning. They remind us that the most powerful art is that which manages to keep alive the tension between the visible and the invisible, between the material and the spiritual, between what we know and what we can never completely understand.
Kato’s work confronts us with a fundamental question: how to poetically inhabit a disenchanted world? His creatures, both primitive and futuristic, natural and artificial, suggest a possible path: not the impossible return to a mythical origin, nor the forward flight into a technological future, but the patient invention of new forms of presence in the world, new ways of being together, human and non-human, in the shared strangeness of our contemporary condition.
