Wind IV

A garland of ivy and small orange flowers runs the width of the top edge, and two maroon horses gallop just beneath it, the only fully intact, fully legible things in the painting. Between them, a figure is coming apart: navy blocks, red streaks, loose fragments of color that read as a body only in the sense that they're roughly where a body would be. At the bottom, two smokestacks push white smoke up out of churned, muddy ground.

Kato stacks this canvas in three bands. Flowers and horses hold the top. Industry holds the bottom. The figure caught in between isn't standing on solid ground, it's being pressed from both directions at once, and it's already lost its outline.

Neither side of this painting is rescuing the figure in the middle. The natural world above and the industrial world below aren't fighting each other, they're squeezing the same thing from opposite ends, and what's caught between them has stopped holding its shape. It's the most literal image of being crushed in the middle that Kato paints in this group.