«The composition of much of Saito's painted work was significantly influenced by and in dialogue with the geography of his theatre productions. A dualistic nature to Saito himself took material form in the interplay between the collaborative theatre and the personal, private realm of the painting studio. Art critic Karen Wilkin writes, if we are attentive, we discover that characters from his stage pieces have been reincarnated as abstract configurations within his paintings, reborn as the records of animated gestures that retain the individuality of their sources.»
A commonality in the entire body of Saito's work, both on stage or on canvas, focuses on written signs. Repeated investigations of alphabet in Saito's work, both real and made-up, legible and obscured, speak to moments in his personal history.[4] As a young immigrant in a country whose language he did not speak, Saito wrote space for himself in the already-established Color Field tradition by constructing his own painterly lexicon. Opposing motifs of free gestural brushtrokes and elegant, ordered lettering allude again to his double practice as painter and architect of poetic performance. Abstraction in Saito's work points to a meditation on the instabilities and impermanence of language and the mutability of meaning. Departing from structuralist[disambiguation needed] systems of transmuting signs, a space opens that Saito fills with vibrant color.

More