Aki Kuroda - Singularities

Aki Kuroda, Retrospective Selection of Works (Galerie Yoyo Maeght)

The artist is surely one of the doyens of this Asian Show. Aki Kuroda questions the place of man in the universe. He plays with and explores all dimensions, all distances, patiently, delving into the cosmos, time, silence, and night.

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

For his 80^th birthday, Olivier Kaeppelin, former director of the Maeght Foundation, wrote a luminous text from which we have taken an excerpt: " Aki Kuroda, with the figures he draws, the colors he makes burst on the canvas like stars or red flowers, never abandons the idea of passing, through painting, into a space beyond where everything reveals itself. Very often, you will see his archetypal character Silhouette, a Matisse-like profile comparable to A.R. Penck's Standart brut, advancing towards the background of the painting where geometry suggests a "threshold", a door towards which he guides us.

Amidst the clutter, troubles, and fires of the world, he reminds us, once again with Apollinaire: that "it is high time to rekindle the stars." read more