Aki Kuroda - The Worlds of Aki Kuroda

Aki Kuroda likes to create worlds where the three axes of life mix and intertwine: the past, the present and the future.

Aki Kuroda questions man's place in the universe. He plays and plays with all dimensions, all distances, patiently, he explores the cosmos, time, silence, night.

In spaces that overlap and sometimes collide, Alice meets the rabbit, the Minotaur keeps watch, the planets wander, Ariadne's thread guides us through the labyrinth, mysterious animals fly over cities that emerge from the spatial night and organize themselves so that the human figure finds its place in their meanders.

In Aki Kuroda's work, themes come and return without concern for chronology, some are omnipresent and emerge as the creation progresses. This is why the production dates have no importance for Aki Kuroda.

In his work, subjects and themes appear, disappear and resurface over time, over the years.

What matters to him is to allow the passage between the different expressions of his art, but also between eras, civilizations, materiality and the immaterial, between the sidereal void of the Cosmos and our planet.

Selection of prints available: Link here

FIGURES

 The female silhouette that punctuates his work resembles a caryatid. But this figure is not completely human, in a futuristic, and perhaps premonitory, projection, the being, freed from its fleshly envelope, takes on the appearance of a robot, cold and devoid of sensitivity. Sometimes this slender shape transforms into a narrow opening, an entrance, a breach into another world. It becomes the passage between reality and dream, between Earth and the Cosmos.





COSMOFLOWERS

Aki declines to exhaustion the subject of flowers, like a virtuoso imposes his scales daily. Its flowers transform and take the form of a dress, a fish, a cat, a heart, animals, of course Alice's rabbit, but also the elephant which symbolizes for Aki the danger that man poses to his own planet.


RABBITS

With his Rabbits, Kuroda moves away from the fables of the past to delve into his personal mythology dating back to childhood. With an almost unconscious gesture, Kuroda lets himself be guided by his hand and rediscovers a forgotten memory. Beneath the joyful and offbeat appearance of the paintings hide several layers of memories, the rabbit from Alice in Wonderland, the surrealist magazines, or even his surprise at the first dish served on his arrival in France: rabbit! Kuroda refuses to give in to overly cerebral painting and prefers to work with humor. He enjoys drawing the viewer into the dizziness of his paintings. Deconstructing this facade of intellectual painting offers the public a gateway to the work of Aki Kuroda, a vast literary, scientific and artistic universe.

The rabbit and its rapid movements are also the best way for Aki to escape the passage of time, he who refuses to define himself. And yet, the rabbit is him, his part of childhood, his desire to experiment too. Alice's rabbit leaves the garden and almost becomes a laboratory rabbit in her Space Rabbits, satisfying her desire to explore the cosmos in ever greater depth.





COLLAGES

For this series of large format collages, Aki Kuroda first made carborundum engravings, thus sculpting the paper which is then covered with a deep gray print. Then, randomly from the life of his workshop, he cut out, sometimes tore and pasted images sometimes from his archives, exhibition views, boxes, catalogs, and sometimes from Japanese magazines. All these elements, between the West and Asia, compose strange self-portraits.

 

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