The haunting and assertive oil paintings of the Japanese-born artist Saki Kishimoto will be exhibited this November and December at Safe-T-Gallery in a show called “Dots. Lines. Figures.” Often working from images that she has captured from YouTube and other mass media sources, Saki Kishimoto’s paintings start as straight-forward portraits, but then undergo different degrees of metamorphosis as she “infuses the paintings with desire.” Lines and increasingly dots of paint start to cover and transform the initial figure - sometimes to the point that the final paintings appear to be pure abstractions -- and sometimes not. The interaction between the already abstracted media portraits and the layers of dreams and realities placed on them constitute the substance of each work.
   Saki Kishimoto was born in 1977 in Tokyo and has lived, studied and worked in New York since 2002. She is well trained in traditional portraiture, having studied at the National Academy School of Fine Arts in New York, from whence she has won a number of awards for her student work. The pieces in “Dots. Lines. Figures.” however are a strong, personal departure from that work. Emerging from sources as diverse as the video animations of William Kentridge, the sensual and disturbing paintings of Marlene Dumas and the color and spatial concerns of Luc Tuymans, the paintings are visceral, at times sensual and feminine, but always with a muscularity and intellectual assuredness to them -- there is no question who is in charge in these paintings.
   “Dots. Lines. Figures.” will be Saki Kishimoto’s first one-person exhibition. She has previously shown in group exhibits at Safe-T-Gallery, “How Women Look” summer 2007; in the Seventh, Eighth and Tenth Annual Juried Exhibitions at the National Academy Museum, and at other locations. Her work is in a number of private collections in the United States, Canada and in Japan.