Aki Kuroda - By Olivier Kaeppelin

Aki Kuroda's Field of Shards 

In Aki Kuroda, there is an ardor, a happiness in experiencing the power, the freedom of movement that the line offers us... The white, black, or colored lines that he traces. He trusts them as a gesture and as a principle. He moves away from any foundation, from the paralyzing straight drawing. His approach to space is that of a rhythm, not a plane. From her first exhibitions in France, Marguerite Duras was sensitive to this energy, this "sonority" evoking that of the wind that carries and disperses. This twirling expansion, these aerial graphs, white against a night background, change into the colors of the rainbow. They are ephemeral quivers. They start again, constantly, creating not objects but passages, lights that the eye seeks to follow. They arouse the desire for surprise where the viewer becomes a lookout. He "hunts", drawn on a path to decipher : perhaps that of a labyrinth in search of an incarnation, as we understand in his dialogue with Pascal Quignard around the Minotaur. Theseus, here painter and hunter, confronts the archetype of a Form-monster, the Greek Asterion like the Japanese "Yokoi". This form, engenders figures of animal and human chimeras, strange humanoids, anthropomorphic architectures, characters of science fiction or media mythologies. In doing so, he avoids symbolic rhetoric in favor of choreographies where we find the power of the line, that of museum art as well as that of comic strips. Aki Kuroda creates a fauna where, if he does not forget, for example, the hare of Albercht Dürer inhabited by light, it is metamorphosed into an energumen actor, a dancing rabbit. Agile, fast, ironic, he is a hybrid who plays with himself.

Aki Kuroda confronts this polymorphic nature directly, through portraits, which are often self-portraits close to the monster forms evoked. They arouse concern, tightrope walkers between composition and decomposition, made of colored violence constructing and erasing faces, traces of brushes scarring the face to, at the same time, give birth to it and make it disappear. They thus carry us into multiple lives, those of this "essential chimera" that is the coupling of reality and painting.

Aki Kuroda is a player. If he places us, without complacency, in front of the human race following the works of Soutine, Kirchner, Schmidt-Rottluff, he does not forget to remind us that he is also the companion of a mischievous animal like his "rabbit", unconcerned with the passage of time and old age that the painter, today, questions.

Aki Kuroda is 80 years old this year. While he has long known that art is a challenge against time, he does not see it as "head to head" but as a war of movements made of mutations, avoidances and surprises. Throughout his work, he sets traps and pitfalls to awaken, "reawaken" our intelligence and our senses. In the same exhibition, he takes us from one territory to another. We dance with him, from one foot to the other, from one sensation to another "in between" as in this mysterious verse by Guillaume Apollinaire, joyful and painful at the same time: "My glass broke like a burst of laughter." These shards build his work, in a dissemination of seeds that give it life. He uses all useful means: painting, engraving, drawing, sculpture... All pictorial materials, from gouache to ink. And as for this ink, there is, in his work, the recurring presence of writing, from the phrase of a poem, from an enumeration of numbers, to the variations of revisited posters, graffitied by the revealing words of "Just for fun", "Passage" or "Space City". In his work, the world manifests itself at all times. In science, which has always fascinated him, as in philosophy and their theories of space. From it, he designed installations or performances that I have a vivid memory of, such as Cristal Hasard with Johanes von Saurma and Joel Borges or even choreographies where he revisited the "ballets russes" and Parade by Erik Satie and Jean Cocteau with Angelin Preljocaj.

I cite these works because they are significant of Aki Kuroda's passion for the polymorphism of creations and in particular, as we have said, for that of astronomy which, in addition to the love he feels for the night, the scintillation and the forging of constellations, allows him to interpret the cosmos for which he has built a Cosmogarden which, beyond surfaces and signs, is a mental garden of wonders.

Aki Kuroda, with the figures he draws, the colours he makes burst forth on the canvas, like stars or red flowers, never abandons the idea of ​​passing, thanks to painting, into a space beyond where everything is revealed. Very often, you will see his archetypal character Silhouette , a Matissian profile comparable to AR Penck's Standart brut , advance towards the back of the painting where the geometry suggests a "threshold", a door towards which he guides us. In the midst of the jumble, troubles and fires of the world, he reminds us, once again with Apollinaire: that "it is high time to relight the stars".

Olivier Kaeppelin