Sugai Kumi

Sugai Kumi: Sakuhin shu, 1952-1975 [Sugai Kumi: A Collection of Works, 1952 – 1975], exh. cat. (Tokyo, 1976), p. 187, no. 9.

“When I drive my sports car at almost 200 kilometers an hour, my mind becomes extremely vigilant. I know that the slightest error could cost me my life. As I hurtle along in a straight line, I feel a sense of void and at the same time absolute joy. Suddenly I feel free and infinitely powerful.”¹

In this monumental work, the viewer is confronted by graduating tones of intensifying and diminishing blues. The rhythmic bands ripple to the edges of the canvas, their wave-like forms gradually loosening and widening outwards with each repetition like the ebbing and flowing of the tides. Sugai champions primary colours, such as flat reds and blacks, for their immediacy. Blue, Sugai notes, is taciturn and changes in the light – its expression more obscure or roundabout.²

Sugai began to refer to his works comprising bold, geometric forms as Horizons (Chiheisen), although the artist states they could just have easily been titled ‘Saturn’ or ‘Eclipse’. What was paramount for Sugai was the nexus of these paintings: a sense of infinite expansion. The rippling effect is shared in works from his Auto Route series. At first glance, they might seem to be iconographies of the sportscar's galloping autoroute itself, but considering that the route is more directly represented as a meandering route in other works, it might be better to think of it more as the flow of air, light or tides.

“My paintings have something in common with road signs which are in my opinion a model of immediate and total communication.”³

Sugai was born in Kobe in 1919 to parents of Malay heritage. Painter and printmaker, Sugai pursued his interest in avant-garde painting and relocated to Paris in 1952. He initially worked in a style akin to informalism or lyrical abstraction and was soon associated with the Nouvelle École de Paris. Sugai’s approach to painting radically transformed in the early 1960s; spurred by his passion for fast cars and contemporary urban life, his work became markedly non-representational. Comprising of bolder lines and brushwork, Sugai's work from this period developed into a hard-edge style of abstraction with an immediacy and directness analogous to the graphic quality of road signs. 

1. Interview with Kumi Sagai by Myriam Smadja in “Painting the Void”, The Unesco Courier, May 1996, p. 28.

2. ibid., 30.

3. ibid., 29.