The New Religious Image II

A horned figure in a dark red robe floats above the scene like an old icon painting, but everything underneath it has been rebuilt. What should be worshippers are two hooded shapes hauling burlap sacks across scorched ground, lit by a small hard white sun and a red haze at the horizon that reads more like a fire than a sunset.

Between the sky god and the ground stands a totem built from hazard stripe fabric, black grid patterning, and a pair of bare skeletal hands, the closest thing to a congregation left in the scene. Kato's title asks its question directly: if the old religious image no longer organizes what people actually kneel to, what replaces it?

Look at what's actually being worshipped here: hazard tape, hard labor, a tree on the right edge that's already dissolving into scrawled graffiti tags. Kato is betting that whatever comes next won't be held together by the old sacred images. Neither will pretending otherwise.