"Domoto Hisao was also born in 1928, and was primarily trained as a nihonga artist in his youth. When he moved to France in 1955, the artist found it increasingly difficult to continue using Japanese pigments as the dominant medium for his artworks, and switched to oil painting. His move to France also precipitated a meeting with the Informel group, who was gaining increasing moment from the fifties onwards. Almost immediately upon his arrival in France, Domoto’s works took on an Abstractionist flair, and were created organically with swift movements resembling half-circles swinging freely throughout the canvas. This bold movement is reminiscent of clouds or even waves, and aims to mimic nature. As can be seen in Painting 1960-14 (Lot 704), which is an early example of Domoto’s technique of mimesis of the ebbing and flowing inherent to his oeuvre, much attention has been paid to the balance of positive and negative space. Coupled with the light brushwork of each stroke, one is immediately reminded of delicate Eastern calligraphy or even lightly-pigmented scrolls, and it is easy to feel the amalgamation of such two worlds through the swift and bold undulations of his canvas. According to Tapié, who lavished praise on Domoto’s works, the importance of space was at the heart of the artist’s success at marrying Eastern and Western influences. They were all filled with “an ambiguous space that subsumes both the dialectical attainments of Western mathematicians in topological composition and the intuitive properties that Eastern painting has carefully upheld down through centuries. Which is to say that, no matter how complex, Domoto’s paintings are always elegant and intuitive, yet have the precision of clearly delineated proofs.”3 In such a way, Domoto can be understood as among the first of all Japanese artists—if not the first—to be able to marry traditional structured Western composition with the lyrical freedoms of Eastern philosophy."(sothebys.com)
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