There has always been a bit of ancient aesthetics in the works of Japanese artist, Izumi Kato. So perhaps I was a little thrown off when, upon walking into the new Perrotin Gallery space on Pico in Los Angeles, you walk through a hallway of popular toy items from the 20th century upon the walls, submerging you into a bit of childhood fantasy. Then you turn the corner into a sparse, brilliant space where Kato's familiar sculptures and paintings greet you, spaced in both size and location. It's like a meeting of worlds, something prehistoric with something a bit anciently contemporary. Kato thought about the location of the show, Southern California, a place he notes "where one can encounter the extremes of both prehistoric geology and urban modernity," and creating something both dense and completely open. It's stunning and jarring, but also hypnotic and quiet.
And you can't help but thing of cave paintings or even centuries old sculptures when you see Kato's work. He balances these monolithic sculptural works with almost toy-sized figures, oil paintings that don't quite resemble humanity but have familiar bodily shapes. It's all like some sort of folkloric experimentation of how far you can transform your aesthetic into something historic. Plastic makes way to concrete, oil to something strangely alien. It's all the Kato universe, unearthed and brought to life. —Evan Pricco