Ollin

Kazuya Sakai

OndulacionesRightOff
OndulacionesRightOff

Kazuya Sakai (1927, Buenos Aires; 2001, Dallas) was a painter, a critic, a translator, a magazine designer, a professor and a jazz man on the radio, and three countries claim him. He was born to Japanese parents on October 1, 1927, and taken to Japan as a child. He was educated there, through Waseda University in Tokyo, in philosophy and letters. In 1951 he went back to Argentina. He translated Japanese literature and Buddhist texts into Spanish and taught at the university. He founded the Instituto Argentino Japonés de Cultura in 1956 and hosted radio programs on jazz and modern music. He also taught himself to paint. His first solo show was in 1952. By the end of the decade he was one of the country's leading gestural painters, black calligraphic strokes and spatters on bare grounds, shown beside Fernández-Muro, Grilo, Testa and Ocampo. In 1963 he moved to New York, where Galería Bonino had opened a branch, and painted there for two years.

In 1965 he took a post at El Colegio de México teaching Oriental studies, and Mexico City became his chosen home for twelve years. He taught, later at UNAM, hosted shows on Radio Universidad and Radio Educación, and showed at Galería Juan Martín, his gallery for almost thirty years. In those years the painting changed. By the late 1960s the brushstroke was gone, replaced by strips of paint with hard edges and large areas of one flat color. He is counted among the first to exhibit geometric abstraction in Mexico, and the Museo de Arte Moderno put him in El geometrismo en México in 1976. From its first issue in October 1971 he was part of Plural, the magazine Octavio Paz directed at the newspaper Excélsior. From 1972 until it ended in 1976 he was its managing editor and art director. With Vicente Rojo he drew its logotype, every letter formed by two bands of different colors running in parallel, and the covers and pages carried his bands and circles. The magazine ended when the government engineered the removal of Excélsior's editor, and Sakai followed Paz to Vuelta.

Around 1973 the circle came into the fields, in canvases named for the music he played on the air. Miles Davis, A Tribute to Jack Johnson (II) Right Off is a landscape of arcs: two navy suns ruled with white rings over red hills and lobes, with a striped horizon between them. In 1975 he published Homenaje a Kōrin, a limited edition of prints that he called exercises for what came next. He admired in the Rinpa painter's work the "repeated curves, circles, and sinuous lines that flow without beginning or apparent end." What came next was Ondulaciones, acrylics on one flat ground. A ribbon of hard-edge parallel bands enters the canvas straight, from a side, and curves and twists into concentric circles, disc after disc, before running off another side. They are variations on a theme, almost none alike, and nearly all titled after a composer or a piece: Filles de Kilimanjaro III (Miles Davis), Corona (Takemitsu), Bohor II (Iannis Xenakis), All Set for Jazz Ensemble (Milton Babbitt), Come Out (Steve Reich), Agartha II, Bugaku. In October 1976 the Museo de Arte Moderno gave him a solo show, Kazuya Sakai, Pinturas: Ondulaciones cromáticas y simultáneas. It held thirty-three works of 1975 and 1976, and he dedicated it in the catalog "a la música." His friend the critic Damián Bayón wrote that he "almost literally composes his paintings as a musician might compose a musical piece." The Blanton Museum of Art in Austin bought Filles de Kilimanjaro III in 1977.

He left Mexico in 1977 and spent the rest of his life in Texas. He held the Tinker Chair at the University of Texas at Austin for a year, taught two years in San Antonio, and from 1980 until he retired in 1997 taught at the University of Texas at Dallas. The bands went on changing after the move. At the McNay in 1979 they were sliced and overlapped on shaped canvases, with gradients in place of flat colors. In the 1980s came the Genroku paintings, layered planes after the Japanese period of that name, shown at the Museo de Arte Moderno in 1987. A series of computer-generated Sky prints followed, shown at the Second International Symposium on Electronic Art in 1990. He died in Dallas on August 27, 2001. The Museo de Arte Moderno gave his Mexican years a retrospective in 2016, Kazuya Sakai en México (1965-1977). In 2025 it hung the seven Ondulaciones canvases it owns, with the music they are named for playing in the room.

He belongs in this set because the rule under the Ondulaciones is one line. A ribbon of parallel bands follows a path of arcs and straight runs, and every band is that path moved across by its own width. A computer draws that exactly: on a circle the offset is a concentric arc, on a run a parallel line. Neighbors share their edge point for point, and the fills meet with nothing between them. The two sketches here keep the rule and deal the route he composed by hand.

Learn more:

Recreations here

  • Ondulaciones: the undulations of 1975 and 1976. A ribbon of parallel bands comes into the panel straight, from the left or up from the bottom, wraps a disc in concentric arcs, lets go of it and wraps the next the other way round, and so on across the panel until it runs straight off another side. The ribbon's centerline is a chain of circles and straight runs, each link an S where two circles touch, an S with a straight middle, or a run to a circle gone round the same way, every turn placed clear of every earlier turn and run. Every band edge is the centerline moved across by its own offset, so on a circle it is a concentric arc and on a run a parallel line, and neighbors share their edge point for point. look picks kilimanjaro (a dark green ground, the ribbon red, yellow, indigo, black, violet, a wide navy and red again, and discs that glow from a bright core to a saturated rim, after Filles de Kilimanjaro III), serigrafia (orange paper, the ribbon navy, white, blue-violet, a thread of the paper, navy and red, white discs, and some turns around nothing, after the 1975 screenprint) or violeta (a purple ground and a rainbow ribbon with a lilac band along one side, after the purple canvases of the series). stations, bandWidth, discRadius, gap, winding and seconds are the rest of the controls, and the seed deals the route, the discs and where the ribbon comes in and goes out. Over one cycle the ribbon is laid down from its entry to its exit, each disc appearing as the ribbon reaches it, holds, and is taken back the way it came. An original Ollin interpretation written from the paintings; there is no code to port, the work is acrylic on canvas.
  swift run Example-Recreations-KazuyaSakai-Ondulaciones

The panel back as the regions the paint covers, every band one closed outline and every disc a circle:

  swift run Example-Recreations-KazuyaSakai-Ondulaciones --seed 5 --param look=serigrafia --export-svg ondulaciones.svg --frame 432
  • RightOff: the fields of 1973, after Miles Davis, A Tribute to Jack Johnson (II) Right Off. The ground is a score of horizontal bands, a maroon sky, a zone of thin stripes in a dealt order, a dark band with two white hairlines, and navy to the bottom. Over it sit suns navy discs set in from the top corners, each ruled with rings white rings a step apart inside a white rim; hills crescents of circles centered far below the panel, each thickest at its own edge and thinning to nothing at the valley, with the stripes running across them; and last two red lobes, circles centered out past the bottom corners, whose arcs leave the valley open between them. The seed deals every height, center, radius and stripe. Over one cycle the rings travel outward through each sun laps times, the lobes rise and fall against each other so the valley breathes, and the hills slide a little. An original Ollin interpretation written from the painting.
  swift run Example-Recreations-KazuyaSakai-RightOff

The score as rectangles, every ring and lobe a circle, each hill one outline with a hole:

  swift run Example-Recreations-KazuyaSakai-RightOff --seed 2 --export-svg right-off.svg --frame 0

This is a homage after Kazuya Sakai, made for learning. It isn't a reproduction of a specific work, and it isn't affiliated with or endorsed by the artist or his estate.

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