March.5 - 22, 2026 | Tue - Sun | 12:00-19:00
Keisuke Katsuki
ON-SCREEN
香月恵介個展
Painting Artificial Light
Minnano Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Keisuke Katsuki, marking his first solo show at the gallery since 2022.
The exhibition features more than twenty works from Katsuki’s long-running pixel painting series “3600 Colors,” along with two sets of editioned works. Together, these works represent his sustained exploration of painting artificial light.
Through the arrangement of these works, the gallery space becomes an environment that feels as though a computer screen has materialized in the physical world. By tracing the relationship between vision and media—from traditional painting to contemporary digital displays—the exhibition invites viewers to reconsider how we see, and how our ways of seeing are shaped.
Keisuke Katsuki
Born in Fukuoka, Japan, 1991
MFA, Tokyo Zokei University, Department of Fine Arts, 2016
Keisuke Katsuki’s practice centers on Pixel Painting, in which images displayed on monitors are reconstructed according to their display structure by reproducing red, green, and blue pixels with paint. The source images often derive from paintings by Claude Monet and J. M. W. Turner—artists renowned for their depictions of light. By translating these works into images on monitors, a product of modern optical technology, and then rendering them again as paintings, Katsuki encourages a reconsideration of image and light in the contemporary context.
In addition to Pixel Painting, Katsuki has developed the Lux series, in which RGB lights are projected onto pixel paintings, as well as the abstract painting series Gray, composed of surfaces where material gray—formed through the accidental mixing of pigments—and optical gray, generated as a virtual construct, coexist. Through these works, he examines the relationship between contemporary light and painting.
In recent years, Katsuki has also produced a photographic series titled Angels, consisting of pseudo-spirit photographs generated by diffusion-model AI and then captured using classical photographic techniques. By interpreting figures displayed on liquid crystal screens through the allegory of Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, this series explores the conditions under which contemporary image media currently operate.
Awards
Gunma Young Artists Biennale, Excellence Award (2021)
32nd Holbein Scholarship Recipient (2017)
Tokyo Zokei University ZOKEI Award (2016, 2014)
Liquitex Art Prize, Grand Prix (2014)
Exhibition Dates
March 5 (Thu) – March 22 (Sun), 2026
Opening Hours
12:00 – 19:00
Closed
Mondays
Venue
Minnano Gallery
2F, 4-14-3 Higashiueno, Taito-ku, Tokyo
Admission
Free
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3600Colors
Keisuke Katsuki’s practice begins with a fundamental question: how are images displayed? Images shown on digital displays are so embedded in our daily lives that we rarely stop to consider their structure or the systems that produce them. Katsuki, however, directs his attention to these underlying display mechanisms themselves, using painting as a medium through which they can be made visible.
The “3600 Colors” series presented in this exhibition is a representative example of this approach. Each work in the series is composed of a grid measuring 60 by 60 units, totaling 3,600 pixels, and is conceived with the premise of the vast, ubiquitous imagery that circulates across the internet. The square format of the works further evokes an environment in which images are uniformly aligned and perceived as a set or an index—an arrangement strongly reminiscent of internet-based modes of display.
By predetermining screen size and pixel count, the images depicted are placed on the same plane first and foremost as display formats, prior to considerations of subject matter or narrative. Within this framework, images drawn from art history, fragments of imagery pervasive online, and abstract configurations without a specific reference all exist under identical conditions and are treated equivalently.
Katsuki has also conceived these works with their installation in mind, anticipating their arrangement in a grid within the exhibition space. While each piece stands as an independent painting, the repetition of a unified format across the wall generates a visual experience akin to encountering an array of images on a browser or an online gallery—an internet screen materialized within physical space. What is foregrounded here is not so much the content of each image, but the conditions of seeing through which images are encountered.
In the nineteenth century, Joseph Mallord William Turner responded in painting to the transformed conditions of seeing brought about by the Industrial Revolution, when steam engines and railways radically altered human experiences of speed and movement. By depicting visual fields destabilized by rain, fog, and steam, Turner absorbed into his paintings the very transformation of perception produced by modernization.
Claude Monet, who followed, likewise confronted an era in which the advent of photography detached painting from the task of accurate representation. Through serial works that captured shifting light and atmospheric conditions, Monet shifted the focus of painting away from reproducing the external world toward rendering the visual impression of a given moment.
Katsuki’s practice can be situated within this lineage. The conditions he confronts are those shaped by the digital display as the dominant medium of the present day. Highly advanced and widely adopted technologies tend to be accepted as natural once their underlying mechanisms fade from awareness. Through the works presented in this exhibition, Katsuki draws attention back to these conditions, prompting viewers to reconsider how contemporary visual experience is structured—and how we see.
© Minnano Gallery
