Excerpts and Images from the forthcoming book, Naoko Haruta and Contemporary Abstract Painterly Modernity by Steve Light EXCERPT 1 …It is only with the contemporary, U.S.-based Japanese painter, Naoko Haruta, that the language of advanced and contemporary painterly abstraction, propelled forward by Pollock, but immediately abandoned, has found someone capable not only of developing and transforming this painterly language (understanding of course the ways in which painting and music too are at once language and notlanguage) into an ever increasing vocabulary and into an ever increasing affective and emphatic power, but also of sustaining the intensity, the adventure–-and the intelligence and exultations! >>MORE EXCERPT 2 …The dilemma of our artistic, literary, and philosophical late-modernity-- but this dilemma already exists within all our modernities and within all their temporalities since l930--derives from the maximalist temporalities and finalities of rupture and transformation. Everything, seemingly, has already been done. >>MORE EXCERPT 3 …And this is one of the reasons why Naoko Haruta has felt all the more the urgency of taking the project of contemporary painting neither lightly nor tragically, but rather seriously… >>MORE EXCERPT 4 There are dreams that enter into and then arise so thoroughly from our diurnal experience that when we awaken these dreams do not cease their labor, rather they transform themselves into the very fabric of our burgeoning day such that the dream has become not a wish of fulfillment, but the diurnal fabric, the fabric of fulfillment itself. >>MORE