Marc Katano: Paintings and Prints
May 23 - September 23, 2003

Los Angeles artist Marc Katano believes that an artist is something you are, not something you become. Katano, whose exhibition of recent paintings opens this May at The Contemporary Museum at First Hawaiian Center, paints canvases that resonate with a primal, creative energy. He carefully balances the elements of his compositions, establishing form and order from the markings, arranging them into something larger.

While Katanoâs artistry may be innate, early exposure to visually fascinating surroundings also impacted his development. Katano was born in Tokyo in 1952 to a HawaiÎi-born Japanese-American father and a Japanese mother, and spent much of his childhood on the U.S. military base in Japan where his father was stationed. English became his first language, and while he could also speak Japanese, he could not read or write it. The words he saw, even in the mundane context of advertisements or newspaper articles, looked like abstract forms. He appreciated their elegance as signs conveying meaning, in much the same way that he appreciated the brushwork of his motherâs sumi-e or black ink paintings.

HawaiÎi provided another backdrop for Katanoâs early experience of art. Katano has memories of his paternal grandfather, who worked as a carpenter for C&H Sugar Company and undertook artistic projects as a hobby. His grandfather would make wood forms to create stone lanterns, and once even erected a concrete Mount Fuji in his front yard, complete with a waterfall that ran into a pond and eddied around a turtle-shaped island. Katano later attended St. Louis High School in Honolulu for two years and spent two years at the University of HawaiÎi before earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland.

Katanoâs art is abstract and essentially concerned with mark making ÷ the creation of something controlled, ordered and coherent from invented images. In his current work, Katano utilizes the particular shape of an ellipse, resembling a collapsed pair of parentheses with no corners to interrupt the natural hand movement. He allows the painted ellipses to dry partially and then washes away the wet paint in a slow-dripping process that leaves only a series of outlines. The resulting matrix of thin lines, drawn in this meticulous fashion, gives the impression of movement and speed.

Although Katano fills his canvases with paint, the results never appear cluttered. He guides the viewerâs gaze across the surfaces through interplay of dense and sparse areas, and contrasting light and dark spaces. The resulting paintings are layered, with portions of the canvas more heavily worked than others are ÷ another tool in creating a visual pathway. The artistâs frank delight in formal innovation is evident in his work. Each of Katanoâs canvases celebrates the impulse to create signs, and the ability to arrange these signs into something beautiful and evocative.