Little Red Riding Hood on the Road II

Kato's second version of Little Red Riding Hood keeps the deer, watching passively from the tree line the way they do throughout this collection, and rebuilds almost everything else. The red hood sits inside a wide, scalloped jaw, teeth built directly into the landscape, with patches sewn into the hood reading as a crown, a medical cross, an axe, a pouch.

A rifle angles in from the upper right, a pale hand resting near the trigger, and the wolf still moves low and grey along the road's edge. Kato takes the story's most famous line, the one about big teeth, and builds it into the ground everyone in the painting is standing on.

The wolf was never really the danger in this story. Kato paints the teeth into the setting instead of the animal, a more honest place to put the fear than the woods ever were.

This is the second version Kato has painted of this particular fairy tale and one of the two most recent paintings in the release, alongside Harz Mountains. Owning the current version of a story Kato keeps returning to means owning where that idea stands today, not where it started.