Jesus in the Present V

A small chimney sits at the bottom left of this canvas, and its smoke doesn't rise, it cuts on the diagonal across the entire painting, a long dark streak running from the top corner down through the center. Two wood-toned panels flank the chaos in the middle like the arms of a structure that reads as part cross, part altar. At the center, a fragmented totem takes shape: a dark elongated form with one gold eye, a teal-striped block, a mass of loose red brushwork, a small magenta tag.

In the upper right corner, away from all of it, the painting opens into gold light and a climbing rose vine. An antelope runs clear along a pale path at the bottom, the one figure in the composition that isn't caught in the smoke's path.

This is the third painting in this release with a chimney in it, and the only one where the smoke itself becomes the composition's main line of force, cutting across wood, myth, and animal alike without stopping for any of them. Kato asks what still functions as sacrifice once the altar is built from scrap wood and the sky is smoke, a question that runs through most of his major work, not just this piece. His answer keeps landing in the same place: whatever industry throws off becomes the material for whatever we still need to believe in.