Speed and sports cars were also effective artistic motivations for the Japanese painter Kumi Sugai (1919-96), best known for his late hard-edge abstractions. Though their politics and cultural backgrounds were vastly different, his engagement was of peculiarly close parlance to Marinetti's: "When I drive my sports car at almost 200 kilometers an hour, my mind becomes extremely vigilant. As I hurtle along in a straight line, I feel a sense of void and at the same time absolute joy." "Alone in my studio," he continued, "I rediscover the void that I experienced when driving my car at top speed." Paring down the details of life, Sugai went on to forge a minimally reduced art as a direct vehicle of communication.

Sugai was born in Kobe. Entering Osaka Art School in 1933, he left early and ended up with the Hankyu Railway Company in 1937 as a commercial poster designer. In the wake of World War II he decided to become a painter and headed for Paris in 1952. In an early painting like "Thunder" (1954) he worked with abstracted natural forms like an ovular mountain that rises into a blue sky to meet a scumbled cloud that lingers above. Other budding works such as "Red Devil" (1955) relate to older Japanese themes, and the abstracted elements lend themselves to various kinds of figurative discernments, such as the horns that rise up from what is presumably a head.

By 1962, a more thoroughgoing abstraction emerged which saw him making large blocked-color works utilizing rough brushwork. Customarily, empty passages tended to open up in the middle of the canvases, a representative example being "AO (Bleu)" (1962). Around 1964 he had matured to a hard-edged abstraction, though the reduced forms often retained a clear proximity to description in titles and imagery. In "Morning on the Expressway" (1965) a central black line wanders through the picture from top to bottom overtop a flat white vertical band. Above it a single and simple grey cloud hovers.

There followed the further refinement of previous shapes into what constitute formal emblems independent of original origins. Accompanying the formal reductions were chromatic ones, usually to a minimal palette of red, white and black. The descriptive value of titles diminished too. An example comes in a 1973 lithograph called "Windmill," whose dynamic blade forms lunge outward to the work's corners. That "content" motif became pure "form" in a large painting titled "Variation A.A" (1973).

Sugai's final years turned to the "S" series (1987-91), the shape of which could alternatively be taken as a development of the "expressway" motif, or the "S" of Sugai, relating to his early work in typography with Hankyu. That "S" traveled into the "Cadmium Red" series too, combining with the black and white chequer pattern of the finishing flag known to Formula One fans. "My paintings have something in common with road signs," said Sugai, "which are in my opinion a model of immediate and total communication. On the highway, road signs transmit a clear message that any driver, irrespective of nationality or culture, can grasp in a fraction of a second."

Sugai described his late work as being beyond human language but nonetheless communicating directly and instantaneously with viewers. He also invoked an austere silence in their reception. Speed and perceptual dynamism were his ways of accessing silence, and almost were, prematurely and macabrely, in a 1967 car accident. His futuristic vision was of a "speechless universe" stripped of its unnecessary trappings where individuals would communicate solely by signals -- as his abstractions portend. In such a place, he thought, art would finally become indispensable: "It alone will be able to support a world reduced to its simplest form of expression."