Jon Sasaki
Making Do With The Photons That Linger After The Sun Has Set

[En anglais]

With his new series of twilight pochades, Jon Sasaki delivered a Whistlerian nocturne for our dark times. Boldly departing from obligatory standards of illumination calibrated to maximize Instagrammability, the fluorescent lights in the main gallery at Clint Roenisch were dimmed to half strength for the presentation of these enigmatic paintings appropriately framed in a light-absorbing shade of ultra-black. This muted atmosphere elicited slow looking that mirrored Sasaki’s durational process. Adapting his penchant for endurance art to a hazardous plein air methodology, his works in oil on plywood are compelling records of his quixotic quest to capture the fleeting moment of dusk’s transition into night.

Produced over a ten-month span characterized by the progressive darkening of collective horizons, Sasaki’s paintings were executed in wooded areas on the outskirts of Toronto during the brief nightly window known as “nautical dusk” — a period extending from about half an hour after sunset until the horizon disappears to observers at sea. This temporal constraint skilfully transposed the trademark rigour of Sasaki’s perilous performances into a painterly idiom reminiscent at once of tonalist atmospherics and pointillist facticity. The fin-de-siècleambit of these stylistic references anchors Sasaki’s parallel invocation of Japanese aesthetics of mono no aware, a “sensitivity to ephemera” that also inspired the painter James McNeill Whistler’s renderings of fugitive light effects.