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{"id":273376,"date":"2026-01-01T16:20:00","date_gmt":"2026-01-01T21:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/compte-rendu\/jon-sasakibremmaking-do-with-the-photons-that-linger-after-the-sun-has-set-em\/"},"modified":"2026-01-08T14:52:31","modified_gmt":"2026-01-08T19:52:31","slug":"jon-sasaki-making-do-with-the-photons-that-linger-after-the-sun-has-set","status":"publish","type":"compte-rendu","link":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/reviews\/jon-sasaki-making-do-with-the-photons-that-linger-after-the-sun-has-set\/","title":{"rendered":"Jon Sasaki
Making Do With The Photons That Linger After The Sun Has Set<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\u2019s 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\u2019s transition into night<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Produced over a ten-month span characterized by the progressive darkening of collective horizons, Sasaki\u2019s paintings were executed in wooded areas on the outskirts of Toronto during the brief nightly window known as \u201cnautical dusk\u201d\u200a\u2014\u200aa 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\u2019s perilous performances into a painterly idiom reminiscent at once of tonalist atmospherics and pointillist facticity. The fin-de-si\u00e8cleambit of these stylistic references anchors Sasaki\u2019s parallel invocation of Japanese aesthetics of mono no aware<\/em>, a \u201csensitivity to ephemera\u201d that also inspired the painter James McNeill Whistler\u2019s renderings of fugitive light effects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\"Jon
Jon Sasaki
<\/strong>December 8, 2024<\/em>, 2024, installation view, Clint Roenisch Gallery, Toronto, 2025.
Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid, courtesy of
Clint Roenisch Gallery, Toronto<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Sasaki\u2019s matter-of-fact brushwork obliquely recalls the scientific aura of pointillist facture, the absorbency of his plywood support strategically muffling surface incident. The resulting tension between impersonal objectivity and subjective observation connects this series to his earlier evocations of romantic science. In meticulous graphite renderings of eye floaters that only Sasaki can see, for instance, his body has figured as an unreliable recording instrument reminiscent of the self-experimentation performed by artist-scientists such as the colour theorist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Having abandoned his early career as a painter, Marcel Duchamp would subsequently harbour a lasting ambition to re-
establish the experimental basis of Georges Seurat\u2019s colour-theory\u200a\u2014\u200ainspired divisionism on a non-painterly footing\u200a\u2014\u200aan ambition fulfilled by his proto-Op Rotoreliefs<\/em> (1935\/1953). Sasaki\u2019s studies of waning visibility are situated within this same trajectory of conceptual engagement with painting as a springboard for perceptual experimentation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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\"Jon
Jon Sasaki
<\/strong>March 11, 2025<\/em>, 2025, installation view, Clint Roenisch Gallery, Toronto, 2025.
Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid, courtesy of
Clint Roenisch Gallery, Toronto<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Frequently mistaken for antagonists, conceptualism and painting have in fact long occasioned fruitful dialogue. Following in the footsteps of forebears including Art & Language and John Baldessari, Sasaki has been circling the modernist Ur-medium in works probing its purist exclusions for several years. The presence of one of his signature images of microbial cultures grown from the palettes of Group of Seven members in the front gallery at Clint Roenisch underscored continuities between such conceptually driven excavations of the ordinarily invisible discontents of modernist painting and his more recent, hands-on venture in oils. His Lawren Harris-\u200ainspired documentation of immaterial auras, realized with the assistance of clairvoyants, is another foreshadowing of the liminal states of visibility reported by Making Do With The Photons That Linger After The Sun Has Set<\/em>. But despite hovering at the borderline of perceptibility, works in this series are animated by hairpin dramas of natural and artificial illumination worthy of Whistler\u2019s brush. In contrast to the aestheticist\u2019s credo of  \u201cart for art\u2019s sake,\u201d however, Sasaki\u2019s quicksilver studies of dying light unfold a subtle response to the current confluence of global crises.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Clint Roenisch Gallery,<\/strong> Toronto<\/br>September 4\u200a\u2013\u200aOctober 18, 2025<\/br>","protected":false},"author":6506,"featured_media":273369,"template":"","categories":[884],"numeros":[7754],"disciplines":[],"statuts":[],"checklist":[],"auteurs":[832],"artistes":[6347],"thematiques":[],"type_compte-rendu":[],"class_list":["post-273376","compte-rendu","type-compte-rendu","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews","numeros-116-immersion-en","auteurs-adam-lauder","artistes-jon-sasaki-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/compte-rendu\/273376","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/compte-rendu"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/compte-rendu"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6506"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/273369"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=273376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=273376"},{"taxonomy":"numeros","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/numeros?post=273376"},{"taxonomy":"disciplines","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/disciplines?post=273376"},{"taxonomy":"statuts","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/statuts?post=273376"},{"taxonomy":"checklist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/checklist?post=273376"},{"taxonomy":"auteurs","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/auteurs?post=273376"},{"taxonomy":"artistes","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artistes?post=273376"},{"taxonomy":"thematiques","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/thematiques?post=273376"},{"taxonomy":"type_compte-rendu","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/type_compte-rendu?post=273376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}