Aki Kuroda by Marquerite Duras - The Darkness of Aki Kuroda

The Darkness of Aki Kuroda by Marguerite Duras, 1980

There are fourteen paintings in Aki Kuroda's exhibition. In appearance, they look similar. This resemblance remains external, it only allows the grouping of the work done over three years. The paintings are not alike. I didn't see that Aki Kuroda was painting night black. I saw that he painted this or that night, another and another, the general night not existing. The fourteen paintings are named by Aki Kuroda: The Darkness. This plural is exhibition. It expresses the fact of exposure.

Aki Kuroda first pretends to paint. He actually paints. He covers the entire canvas with white paint, he paints it over its entire surface white. Then he has to wait for the canvas to dry. Days, maybe weeks, I don't know. Then Aki Kuroda does it again. He acts as if he is painting. He paints. He covers the white canvas with black paint. It is by going back into the work of Aki Kuroda that I see the depth of time that he must amass on the surface of the canvas to then approach it with what will become the disfigurement of the black secularly called the painting. Everyone, it seems to me, should see it as I do. So, with black, it covers the white. There, at this stage, already, for me, the fear begins because the black will remain forever on the white. And because on some of the canvases, especially the most recent, we can no longer say that the black surface is only covering the white surface.

Something else happens, is visible, yes, already, irregularities, movements, barely visible accidents which occur, arise and then repeat themselves regularly. You perhaps remember these prints of the bare feet of a prehistoric man buried in clay thirty thousand years thick, the footsteps of someone who passed, who slipped, who fell, who is raised and who then left the clay path where his steps were written and who then never appears again, buried in clay thirty thousand years thick, the steps of someone who passed, who who slipped, who fell, who got up and who then left the clay path where his steps were written and who then never appears again.

In the end the beams of accidents of the black thickness produce a direction. The canvas takes a direction. She will always keep it. This is admirable. Yes, the quivering of the painting hand, the right hand here I believe, produces a sort of general direction of the canvas, a path, like that of the wind. What will cover the canvas at the end of the course will also be caught in this wind. Since the beginning of the world the wind has never passed the sand or anything else like this, ever. It was never the same wind, the same sand, never. Here, today, what passes before us is the hand of Aki Kuroda, it is the wind which arrives on the cool, still liquid black and bends it as it would bend the sand beneath it or the surface of the sea... /…

There is an intermediate stage between the blacks and the destruction of their extent which concerns the grid of the blacks, their division into balanced fractions, into notebook lines or showers perfectly perpendicular to the bottom of the canvas. But I see there an additional outburst of the sacrificial stage, even more unbelief, intoxication, even more time in the thickness of the canvas, even more ceremonial, but of no cult, of none, that for always arrive at that moment where the entire fortune of time and life accumulated in the canvas will be at stake.

Just as Aki Kuroda was patient, just as he was slow, so he will become like lightning, lightning, his own danger. This is especially Kuroda, the part that is being played out there. Aki Kuroda builds the territory of his own massacre with the same care as that of his happiness. This is where we are with him. Kuroda thus silences the intelligence of the painting itself. He says that there is there to be understood but without ever knowing what, that there is there to be said but without ever knowing how. The attempt I am making at the moment, I also see it as part of the silence established by Kuroda.

Kuroda is ahead of the silence. It does not illuminate what cannot be illuminated, what does not take the light, what cannot hold it, for example between millions of propositions; that of thought, that of light, that of painting.

The Darkness of Aki Kuroda by Marguerite Duras, 1980