Kikuo Saito’s Tantalizing Abstractions Speak a Language We’ll Never Understand

This essay originally appeared in Reframed, the Art in America newsletter about art that surprises us and works that get us worked up. Sign up here to receive it every Thursday.Scribbled numbers, wiped-away letters, word-like scrawls: all of these recur in Kikuo Saito’s paintings of the early 1990s, a selection of which form a wonderfully mystifying solo show on view now at James Fuentes gallery in New York. The cryptic markings are cast against vast