Kazuya Sakai was a visual artist, designer, critic, translator, and scholar who worked at the juncture between the East and the West. He was an expert in contemporary music and jazz and a professor at universities in Argentina, the United States, and Mexico. After a stint in New York at the height of the Pop art movement, he settled in Mexico City, where he is recognised as a pioneering figure in geometric art. Pintura No. 9 (1969) is one of the works Sakai produced during his years in Mexico, when he encountered artists like Gunther Gerzso, Vicente Rojo, Mathias Goeritz, and Carlos Mérida. It was during that period that Sakai gradually veered away from the gestural and towards compositions with angular geometric shapes intersected by stripes and fields of intense saturated colour. The variations in texture and brightness within the painting are a result of experimentation with acrylic resin. The artist would apply multiple layers of it to some sections of the painting and use masking tape on others to obstruct the resin, thus yielding varying degrees of thickness on the pictorial surface. In this richly varied chromatic work, for example, he used the tape for the black and white areas. The abrupt cuts, sharp points, and slanted perspective lines give sections of the piece an illusion of three-dimensionality. A harmonious and balanced synthesis of spatial relations and simple shapes forges a truly unique language.
—Sonia Becce
