Katsu: Mecha

About

Channelling the mischievous, anarchic spirit of Dadaists from the turn of the 20th Century, Japanese American artist KATSU (b.1982) began as a graffiti writer in the streets of New York in the early 2000s and has been developing his artistic output ever since. 

The term mecha derived from the Japanese word メカ – a shortening of the English term mechanism (メカニズム) – refers to the giant robots or machines (mechs) controlled by humans. Channelling this technology, through custom-built painting drones and specialised software, the artist programs drones to create portraits, landscapes, and abstract dot paintings. Presented as distinctive series’, each of the works have been created by deploying autonomous and semi-autonomous painting drones to render directly on the canvas. The final outcome is not exclusively made by the artist, but instead occurs in collaboration between human and machine - mechas.

For his first exhibition at OMNI, Mecha will present a suite of new paintings made using drone technology which the artist has developed and honed for the past decade.

In a series consisting of large colourful dots, the pigment is built layer upon layer to create abstract fields that bleed and overlap in a manner reminiscent of KATSU’s graffiti heritage. In another, the artist created eight paintings that form a new suite of Dronescapes, The pointalist inspired works present a myriad of times – for example an expansive night scene – as well as distinctive locations, including the desert, and a reimagining of Monet’s Sunset on the Seine. Whereas pointillism focused on each tiny individual brushstroke, Dronescapes outsources the gestures of the human hand in a layering of dots and colour which, when combined together, form to reveal a cohesive whole. 

Another series presented in Mecha comprises of portraits made via the drone with the most economical use of lines, representing a figure in the least number of gestures. In one such work, Woman With Ants In Her Hair, 2022comprises of rudimentary dots, lines and gestures that sit atop a neutral ground. A yellow swash of colour represents her hair. Dark, quick marks make up the ants of the title. Overspray dots of colour splatter the lower canvas, reminding us that the drone made its marks via the artist’s high-tech flying technology. 

These brightly coloured, playful paintings belie a more serious undercurrent. The human experience of mark making has been outsourced via technology to the machine, bringing the idea of authorship and validation into question. Rather than improving quality of life, it can be argued, technology has stripped away humanistic values like freedom, community, and progress by negating the very idea of the individual. Like the evils in Pandora’s Box, these developments cannot be retrieved once they have been released upon the world. 

In a nod to this unknowable potential, in early 2015 KATSU mischievously exploited his newly developed drone technology in one of the first ever acts of large-scale public drone vandalism. Taking less than a minute to complete, the drone spray painted red lines across the face of model Kendall Jenner as she stood six stories tall on one of New York City’s most renowned billboard locations. This small, playful gesture marks a dawning for graffiti artists and vandals, shifting the potential for street writing into a whole new, and for the authorities, terrifying wave of unstoppable possibilities. KATSU’s drone paintings, both on small and monumental scales, interrogate progress at all costs and the onslaught of exploitative uses for these flying vehicles. 

Mecha, presents KATSU’s pioneering technology via playful, expertly rendered paintings which serve to explore the conundrum of progress versus imprudent ambition. The exhibition questions where and how technology is allowed to terminally invade our lives. 

KATSU is an artist and technologist working in San Francisco. He gained his BFA from Parsons School of Design in New York in 2008. KATSU has exhibited in numerous exhibitions including Beyond The Streets, Los Angeles (2018) and Born in the Streets at the Graffiti at the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain in Paris (2009). In 2015 he created Dronescape Summer with Jeffrey Deitch, an outdoor museum of street art.