Sleeping Beauty

Kato stages the fairy tale's climactic moment and then strips it of its ending. A leaded window bursts open on a violet sky, and through it comes not a hero but a fractured knight, his armor dissolving into loose blue paint even as he arrives. Below, thorned rose branches climb a golden tapestry where a stag dissolves into shadow, and a deer grazes at the foot of the scene, indifferent to the drama unfolding above it. The princess lies in the grass among the roses, her face rendered in the same thick, worked color as everything around her, barely distinguishable from the thicket that's supposed to be holding her captive. The tool that should free her isn't a sword. It's a chainsaw, left on the ground, unused.

Kato scatters dozens of small rose decals across the canvas like a repeating wallpaper pattern, flattening the flower that's meant to symbolize love and sacrifice into something closer to product packaging. It's the same move that runs through his work more broadly: myth and nature pressed up against the mechanical and the mass-produced, with neither side winning. This isn't a fairy tale illustration. It's what's left of one after the rescue stalls out.