Opus 425, “Love – I”

Cano produced a mystifying masterwork when he placed vivid colors against a black background.  It is first in a series featuring “Love” as it pertains to a sensitivity in Japanese, minimalistic aesthetics that had influenced both European and American painters (like Whistler & the Impressionists).  Here we see the artist’s long-time devotion to a pure yet varied palette that suggest fish-shapes or mollusks that ‘you would see in an atoll’.  Colors range from warm coral tones to aqueous blues, accentuated by their contrast with so black a background.  For all these paintings he used a Japanese character for ‘Love’ as aesthetic marker.