ewsba.se
“Insincere ironic detachment is abundant,” the Bay Area artist told Hyperallergic. “What is niche now are sincere depictions of the present.”
SAN FRANCISCO — What does reality look like in the age of AI? For the San Francisco-based painter Hiroshi Sato, representational figurative painting is the antidote to our rapid loss of touch with what’s real and what isn’t. His stylistic blend of Bay Area Figurative Movement stylings and Edward Hopper-esque compositions creates an uneasy and uncanny portrait of what it feels like to be alive today — and might offer a way out of the simulacrum we all seem trapped in.
But Sato wasn’t always motivated by a desire to return to the real. He credits the COVID-19 pandemic with shifting his outlook on both politics and painting.
“Before COVID, my practice wasn’t about subject matter at all,” he told me when I visited him in his cramped Mission District studio in San Francisco, one of the last such buildings in the neighborhood artists were pushed out of during the dot-com boom. “When the pandemic happened, I realized that you can’t just keep making work that appears to be immune from time and what’s happening around you.”