Galleries in Paris

Would another register of synthetic suggestions be less easily dried up when one tries to give an idea of Ben Sakoguchiʼs art – of that art so imagery, so profuse in visual splinters strewn everywhere, that only recourse to the image can, in turn, I do not say define its properties, but restore a little of its sensations? [...] What words will render the texture of this stormy, tumultuous work, never however spoiled by the muddle of the close-up (another encounter with Goya, that disciplined anarchist of the canvas)? Are the leaps of the brain, the heart, the body itself, thus provoked, communicable with a persillage of expressive letters? Jumps of amazement: how can this painting, with its « pop » wrapping, be so un-pop, betraying such a personal accent and temperament? Of stupor and admiration: concise, relentlessly tight expression and a swarm of beings, facts, things, captured by an overheated eye. Of stupor, of admiration and of ulceration: so this is what happy America is, so this is what the world is – an evil cesspool where all the iniquities worm their way into the most colourful hang-ups? [...] Is it to have been one of those Japanese Americans interned during the Second World War, is it to have had, among the first landscapes of a young consciousness, the elevations of water castles and watchtowers, and the alleys of camps? In any case, Ben Sakoguchi does not only dispense the nervous, corrosive joy of the observer who loves accuracy and justice (…)
Extract from the text by Damien Aubel in the catalogue of the Ben Sakoguchi-Oranges-pancartes-postcards exhibition Co-edition by Galerie GP & N Vallois & Les presses du réel, 2023