Mother and Child 母子

In the first decades of Showa, the art world was dominated by the so-called Japanese Fauvism. From the colorism that characterized this movement as well as modern painting in general, Saburo Aso boldly departed and attempted to express the human inner emotions through an original handling of light and mass. This is
one of the works in his postwar series of paintings portraying mother and child. The two figures, looming out of the dark, many-layered matiere, convey the woes of the common people living in the general confusion and poverty of postwar Japan. The impression is given by the weak contrast between the background and the figures, which goes against the rules of the chiaroscuro, and by the expression of mass with planes instead of lines. In the 1960s, Aso abandoned this style and started to produce works in a more abstract strain, in which distorted human figures and masses of flesh are presented as part of the background with a dark and vague matière.