Aki Kuroda - Yoyo Maeght, 45 years of friendship

It all began by chance—or rather, by a sign of destiny—on this day in 1980. Marguerite Duras was sitting at a table on the Rue Saint-Benoît. As we chatted, she waved to a nonchalant Asian man strolling along this street in Saint-Germain-des-Près, a district of publishers and art galleries.

He approaches, almost shy, we exchange a few words, our eyes sparkle, laughter bursts forth, three days later, I push open the door to his studio. A shock in front of these immense canvases of an intense black. Aki, instead of telling me about his creations, evokes the Surrealists discovered in his childhood thanks to confidential magazines that his father, a great scholar, received in Kyoto.

I like to remember what my grandfather, Aimé Maeght, told me about these Surrealists, such as the colorful anecdotes about the exhibition he organized with André Breton and Marcel Duchamp in 1947 in his young Parisian gallery. It brought together everything that was internationally remarkable about the Surrealist movement at the time and, more than anything, it marked the beginning of both friendly and professional relationships with Joan Miró, Alberto Giacometti and Alexander Calder. All three were ardent participants in the development of the Fondation Maeght, a creation of my grandfather and inaugurated in 1964 by André Malraux, the first French foundation dedicated exclusively to contemporary art.

In 1980, I was there, in Aki's studio, with the enthusiasm of my twenties! A first solo exhibition was scheduled for the spring at the Galerie Maeght. Marguerite Duras signed "The Darkness of Aki Kuroda," the text in the catalog, a testament to their complicity. How well she captured and accurately expressed all the Asian subtlety of the work. Four years later, with "The Lover," a novel about her youth and her love for an elegant Asian, but this time Chinese, Marguerite Duras would receive the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Hemingway.

On the evening of the opening, Aki and I were unaware that an unbreakable friendship had just been sealed. I will never stray from him again, from both the work and the artist. Every day, he draws me into his cosmogony. Since then, it has been a constantly renewed joy to find ourselves in his studio to build exhibitions, invent performances, decide on editions, dare to desire or defy the laws of artistic gravity.

Forty-five years we've been walking together. Like two daring kids, we've crossed eras and fashions, keeping that thirst for audacity, that taste for challenge. It must be said that with him, the impossible becomes a daily sport. When I look back at everything we've done together, I feel dizzy. I even wonder how we found the time and energy to design more than sixty exhibitions and just as many events. How Aki was able to create a monumental painting for the City of Paris near the Ministry of Culture, be the first artist to have a retrospective at the National Tokyo Museum during his lifetime, embellish the architecture of Tadao Ando with in situ works, borrow elements of the Ariane rocket from the French Space Agency for a performance, occupy an entire building for the Sao Paulo Biennale, succeed Picasso in creating the sets for the ballet "Parade" by choreographer Angelin Preljocaj for the Paris Opera and the Avignon Theatre Festival, develop works with the greatest astrophysicists, Hubert Reeves and Jean-Pierre Biebring, illustrate the successful writer Pascal Quignard, hang monumental canvases in a baroque church in the City of the Popes of Avignon, publish a literary and artistic magazine, present the show "Passage de l'Heure bleue" at the Centre Pompidou, be endorsed by Chinese museums : Doland from Shanghai, TS1 from Beijing, hiding paintings that will only be accessible by following, in the dark, an Ariadne's thread at the bottom of a stone quarry on the banks of the Seine and what about the challenge of presenting a one-man show by a Japanese artist at the Beijing Imperial Museum in the Forbidden City...

In his overall work, which he calls Cosmogarden , the subjects and themes appear, disappear and resurface over time, over the years, without any concern for chronology. This is why the dates of their creation have no importance for him. We meet Ophelia , escaped from Shakespeare's imagination, but also a blue elephant, emblem of a still wild nature, further on Alice meets the rabbit from Wonderland, here the Minotaur watches, 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 and, finally, we discover these stunned faces in his self-portraits. All of them coexist in spaces that overlap and sometimes collide. We enter this universe with enthusiasm, perhaps in search of our own inner cosmos.

Aki doesn't just paint canvases, he creates worlds, passages, labyrinths where we get lost in order to better find ourselves.

For his exhibition at the Château de Malleret, Aki offers us all his freshness and youthful wonder in a profusion of elements that play with space-time, the cosmos, the universe or reality in order to prepare us for the most artistic and creative of futures.

Forty-five years of friendship, artistic adventures, laughter, and improbable exhibitions. And it's not over yet. The story continues, because with Aki, the journey never ends.

Yoyo Maeght, Paris 2024