Aki Kuroda by Camille Fallen - The numbers, the sea, the sea of numbers
Figures, the sea, the sea of figures by Camille Fallen, 2002
From then on, Chaos inaugurates this new space and what tears webs from it and throws them towards the ever more complex becoming of the universe is Numbers. (Sometimes the universe is like a lot of playing cards, Chaos BE, Chance – or strange maps, framed but without landmarks – that chance and chaos exchange). The number makes the law. He was there at the beginning. 1944 is the birth of Aki Kuroda, 10-43, the birth of the cosmos. Almost nothing. A temperature, -270°, a moment, and random figures gave birth to the world. And Aki Kuroda relies on chance. There is no longer any other causality. He has thrown his dice in the sky of the cosmos and he is waiting for the number to come to reproduce itself, the number of becoming and of creation, the number of births and encounters: the accident that breaks the line, continuity and boredom . Like Nietzsche's Zarathustra, he could have said: “'By chance', this is the oldest nobility in the world, I have given it back to all things, I have delivered them from the certainty of the goal... J I found in all things this blessed certainty, namely that they prefer to dance on the feet of chance. (1)” But if Zarathustra plays “at dice with the gods, at the divine table of the earth”, which is “trembling with new creative words... (2)”, Aki Kuroda plays quite differently. The gods have been heckled on the shores of Lake Takara and Earth is now so far away that there are no more dice and no one knows who throws what falls. And what falls the fact of a new fall. The fall is no longer terrestrial; it comes from the Earth but it does not return to him. What quivers here under the influence of creation is a cosmic sea. An ocean of figures, organic and metamorphic.
“Meteorites fell into my brain like an ocean. They created vibrations. My mother once threw an iron at my head. He passed very close to my face. It was my first UFO. »
This ocean is similar both to the sea that we find in Solaris – the book by Stanislas Lem that Andréi Tarkovsky brought to the screen – and to the Platonic khôra that comes to us from Plato's Timaeus. Just as for the khôra which is the "place", the imprint, the womb or the nurse ("of every birth, she is the receptacle and like the nurse"), what comes to be born there floats at the heart of a double oscillation, sometimes this... sometimes that... neither this... nor that... / and this... and that... both this and that.
And if what happens in the sea comes from images, from terrestrial archetypes – but already, they will have had to cross Lake Takara – what comes out and is created there is of a completely different order. About the khôra, Plato writes: “...it is, by nature, like a fingerprint for all things. It is set in motion and cut into figures by the objects which penetrate it and, thanks to their action, it appears sometimes under one aspect, sometimes under another. As for the figures that enter or emerge from it, they are images of eternal beings, which they imprint on it, in a certain way difficult to express and marvelous, of which we are postponing the description. (3) »
If he has to adjourn the description in this way, it is because it belongs to a "third genre" of discourse (triton genos) - neither logos nor mythos - and this type of discourse cannot be approached, we are told. Plato, that “as in a dream”. And it is this dream which, in our opinion, is sheltered and exposed in Aki Kuroda's painting.
Figures, the sea, the sea of figures by Camille Fallen, 2002
- Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, III, “Before Sunrise”.
- Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, III, “The Seven Seals”.
- Plato, Timée, “The place”, “The receptacle”, 48a-51a, Les Belles Lettres, Paris.