Keita Morimoto — born in Osaka, formed between Japan and Canada, now returned to Tokyo — carries within his practice the full weight of that itinerary. His paintings think through light the way the Baroque masters did: not as a physical phenomenon but as an ontological event. In Caravaggio or de la Tour, light does not describe the world — it decides what deserves to exist within it. Morimoto inherits this question and transplants it into the contemporary city, where a solitary streetlamp, a glowing window, a distant farmhouse burning amber against the blue hour become the modern equivalents of the candle flame — sites where the sacred and the industrial, the ancient and the disposable, hold each other in unresolved tension.

His return to charcoal after a decade is a willed act of reduction — not loss, but clarification. In relinquishing color, he strips perception down to its structural conditions — the threshold, the tree, the facade — and asks what remains when the seductive fullness of paint is withdrawn. What remains, these drawings suggest, is something prior to image: a geometry of appearing, the world at the exact moment before it becomes legible.