Self Portraits - Aki Kuroda

A strange, almost monstrous face, which stands out from a bright colored background cluttered with curved lines and sketches: this is what Aki Kuroda's portraits look like, works as mysterious as the artist who painted them. Through this series of self-portraits, Kuroda opens a breach in his paintings and invites the viewer to leave the real world to enter a completely personal world. The artist moves away from his interest in physics and astronomy to invent a metaphysics of his own, re-exploring the same motifs which recur inexorably in his work. The broad brushstrokes which form the central figure recall the swirls of dark lines which characterize his early works, contrasting with the flat areas of pure primary color which bring back to the primitive, fundamental act of painting which has carried him since childhood.

In the hypnotizing face in the center of the canvas, it seems possible to us to glimpse again the Minotaur, embodied in the features of Aki Kuroda. He often paints himself crowned with two horns, which symbolize both the contradictory movements of our society, which tends towards modernity while aspiring to past or timeless myths, and the constant welling of his thoughts. Among the effusion of ideas that come out of his head, we find rabbits, geometric figures, flowers, shadows, intertwined lines that take us back to the chaos of Cosmocity, or even to Ariadne's thread, which it seems to follow throughout his work.