Born in Oita, Japan, in 1906, Key Sato was the eldest of the Japanese artists to settle in Paris after the war, and one of the leading figures of the Ecole de Paris.
From an early age, Sato showed a pronounced taste for drawing, which he was able to develop thanks to his Japanese education, which introduced him to art through writing and the discovery of nature and landscape. In high school, he drew from nature, a technique that was flourishing at the time. He was inspired by Cézanne, who was his master of reference, and his first work was a Cézanne-style self-portrait.
After graduating from the Tokyo Fine Arts School in 1929, he exhibited at the Tokyo National Salon from 1926, and was awarded the Salon's Grand Prix in 1932. By this time, he was a celebrated figurative painter in his homeland. During his first stay in Paris between 1930 and 1934, where he attended the Académie Colarossi, he was greatly attracted by Picasso's cubist works.
On his return to Japan in 1934, he began to question his painting and to move towards abstraction. He tried to shed his virtuoso technique in favor of a mature painting style, offering successive layers of relief with a roughness far removed from the Japanese refinement he rejected. In 1936, he became a founding member of the Shinseisaku (New Works) salon, and a member of the committee of the Kamakura Museum of Modern Art.
Seven years after the war, he seized the opportunity to be sent as a correspondent by the Asahi newspaper to write articles on Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco and Turkey. Having always dreamed of seeing the desert, he saw the discovery of these sandy landscapes as an introduction to abstraction: “the true form of nature: the origin of the forms of abstract nature. Later, he would also say that cave art had a strong influence on him, particularly the Lascaux caves, which he visited on several occasions.
In 1952, he moved once again to the Cité Falguière in Paris. Strongly inspired by nature and the mineral world, he creates works that reflect memories, a kind of geological reverie impregnated with browns, blacks, earth, ochre, sometimes violet and red. His studio is home to a large number of stones, roots, driftwood, branches and bark, all elements of the landscapes he brings to life on his canvases. Key Sato's art lies outside time, ephemerality and gesture.
His first exhibition took place in Paris in 1954 at the Galerie Mirador. He then made a name for himself by taking part in the Salon de Mai exhibition the same year, before meeting Bernard Dorival, renowned curator of the Musée national d'art moderne in Paris, thanks to whom one of his works entered the museum's collections. He then signed a contract with gallery owner Jacques Massol, who presented his work from 1958 to 1962. For Michel Ragon, Key Sato is an “abstract naturalist” like James Guitet, John-Franklin Koening and Antoni Tàpies.
Sato's painting is striking for its roughness, which, to the Western eye, contrasts with classic Japanese art, calligraphic and elegant. But it is also deeply rooted in a form of Japanese aestheticism: it is grave, raw, almost rustic. It's the slow, hermetic nature of No that parallels his painting, showing little action, in a kind of modesty, with hidden emotions.
“Key Sato has applied himself to making a difficult, slow layer of paint, which proceeds by ripening successive layers. [...] We could probably find out how much time it takes Key Sato to produce just one of his works, by counting the successive layers of his paint, like counting the circles of sapwood to find out the age of a tree.” Michel Ragon, Galerie Massol, 1961.
In 1960, he took part in the Venice Biennale with seven large paintings previously exhibited at Galerie Massol, and in 1966 his work was shown in the group exhibition “New Japanese Painting and Sculpture: an exhibition” at the MOMA in New York.
The allusions to nature are evident in the creation of landscapes made of wood or petrified ferns, always supported by a geometric framework emphasizing the vertical or horizontal shift of planes. Traces of solidified lava, aggregates of forms, inclusions of natural elements—stones, wood, foliage. The gesture does not extend beyond the surface of the paper or canvas.The proximity to Staël’s works is reflected in the balance of forms and the deliberate construction, while a connection to Dubuffet appears in the emergence of a metamorphic geology.
Toward the end of his life, he armed himself with symbols: the plant fossil illustrates the vital source of nature, the feather embodies family, and the braid represents harmony. It is the destiny of Man that concerns him. Sato passed away in 1978 in Japan, where he returned at the end of his life, at the age of 72.