AKI KURODA - “SOLO SHOW” EXHIBITION, 2024

Aki Kuroda speaks readily of the forms which occupy his works: blue, which refers to Darkness, the Cosmos, the Minotaur; the white figures, which pass through and symbolize information and the media; man, who deep down is nothing but a digital combination and fragments of DNA; architecture and technology, which dry up the space of life; the labyrinth, which coils its rings outside as well as inside us.

Questions then come to mind: if this is so, then where is the work done, where does freedom reside? In the Minotaur, the radiant source of power? In Ariadne's thread, who connects the world to its most secret questions?

But the thread is Minotaur and the Minotaur is thread. This is what Kuroda's paintings and drawings show. All that remains is a process, a complex and irregular rhythm. Mass flats first. Existence then – the silhouette – which imposes itself in the meeting of forms. Then negation of this order, blurring of lines, reintroduction of chaos. And finally play on this opposition, alternation of phases, tension.

On the one hand, therefore, the chaos which resonates and creates forms in its movement. On the other, a subjectivity which constantly repeats: “No, there is no a priori order! » Reinserting chaos into constructive arrangements appears to be the mission that the painter gave himself. But in doing so, by thus affirming chaos, does he not immediately deny it, does he not reduce it to a simple projection of consciousness?

The need to play on this tension is certainly one of the driving forces of art. “If men invent forms, it is to anchor the fragility that characterizes play to our fleeting world,” writes the Japanese philosopher Tada Michitar ō . There is something in Kuroda's work that responds to this aesthetic. It is by returning art to its mythical origins that the tension of the I is resolved in his work, that the "subjectivity of the artist" is dissolved, that essence and meaning are reconnected, and that the contradictions of one becomes capable of illuminating those of all.

Michael Lucken