Aki Kuroda by Camille Fallen - Cosmogarden

Cosmogarden by Camille Fallen, 1997

What do we do in Cosmogarden ? We love, we get lost, we lose our body and our minds, we laugh, we dance, we paint, we write, we sit on the terrace of cafés, we meet and talk, we wait in dizziness of the cosmos and sometimes, we fall into the heart of the figures, we ignite and we transform at night in the black hole of a sidereal ecstasy, of a secret metempsychosis. Senseless figures and flowers spring up on all sides, sow the space. We no longer know where we are going.
Beyond logos, beyond knowledge.

It is ambiguous, “problematic”, heterogeneous, complex, contradictory.
You have to say it's C.

What is ?

This is one of the keys to Aki Kuroda's universe, but this paradoxical, numerical, alphabetical, organic key opens up as many possibilities as it does enigmas. C is declined as Cosmogarden and hangs in the links of its chain the Catastrophe, the Body, the Chaos, the Complexity, the Cosmos, the Contradiction, the Fall (the Clinamen) and the Color. But C is also the comic. Laughter sometimes occurs in the canvas, the drawing, the objects, a jubilation at the Heart of the disaster, a discreet and ironic tenderness: the conjuration of anguish that swells to the point of bursting out laughter.

C is again Chora and a strange demiurgic power. You have to enter into the passage of this painting, into the spacing of its figures and the color of its abysses to see who is coming there.

In the night, Aki Kuroda waits. The other, something else, the accident of the imperfect God. What comes from “the other side”, from the dark, hidden, unconscious, unknown or cosmic side.

The figures are ahead of all our predictions. Rising from the sea, the spirit comes to them from elsewhere, colors, space, vertigo, stars and islands: it is the baptism of the cosmos, the kiss of the universe, the jet of an impossible flower that opens the painting and the body onto infinity.

Let no one be mistaken. Cosmogarden is here.

...

It is not without pain that the eye traverses these ascending edges before going to burst up there on this point. Like the rock of Sisyphus, my eye is endlessly hoisted and seeks exits. These paintings separate me. I am the vase that has fallen to the ground.

My fall is brittle. I am split by the protruding points, by the sharp protrusions. I count my pieces and the paintings count me. How long do I exist? This labyrinth does not have the form. He makes me repeat my loss and my failure. I would like to be confirmed by one of these poets, of those who claim to have read Hermes Trismegistus, in order to know if perhaps, in front of me, it is not a question of ancient forbidden figures, revealed only to the wise, and if this these are not the signs that compose and illustrate something from the beginning or the end of time. In the evening, I combine them together, to find the order that will allow them to be read. I am not where I believe.

The geometric cutouts of this series of paintings follow one another with evidence, like something hidden for a long time and which has appeared, reproducing a rhythm, a sequence, which certainly remains hermetic, but which has taken on the rhythm of the unformulated suspicions that I had on the world. The black figures on a white background are bare, sad and bare, but paradoxically mystical, although they offer no other hope than that of their appearance.

These sharp pictures cut out the usual order of perceptions, their brutal geometry gives rise to fictions, strange metaphysics: the degrees of impossible stairs lead nowhere, if not to their nameless and placeless summit, a simple point of a triangular height.

Posted during the trip, the postcard paintings now show a completed itinerary. The superimposed slices of color recapitulate the remnants of a fragmented past. The tables come from before. Cartographies and directories of places of passage and memory, they are signed here and there by names that have fallen to the rhythm of nocturnal contingency: Noise, Red Shoes, C-Garden, Minautoromachine, Chora, Vertoù. Traces and marks of the points of impact, the names recall on the mode of the old world what will have taken place. Now the page is turned. Aki Kuroda looks behind. Behind the canvases that still shimmer with the passage of time, the future begins to dawn. He will have sown us. Model for the Manufacture des Œillets, mixed on paper.

The city is now accelerating to the speed of light. The future flashes like lightning. Hertzian stridency, networks of the new world, meaning travels faster than its shadow. Barely cast lines have already arrived that they leave electrified. Telephones, emails, highways, planes, satellites, radars, laptops, internet, we see nothing but fire. X-rayed, the luminous city spreads out in broad daylight, negative of unfathomable pictures. Because the shadow deaf from all sides and redoubles the glow under the brushstrokes. In the darkness of a deep black, the ground hollows and rumbles underground sheltered from the waves which diffuse in all directions the last news. “I would like to paint the disturbing strangeness, show the repressed. The city lights repress the dark impulses of the animal shadow”. Virtual, unreal, the teleported midday specters spin at full speed while the shadows of ancient bodies gather underground like a herd of beasts. The city growls at the sound of archaic impulses. The city broods in secret. The city is harboring a secret. Aki Kuroda palpates, stirs and gropes the bottom. Now he gardens his paintings.

It cultivates and hatches the seeds of the disturbing strangeness. “There is a blue bird called the garden bird. It begins by raising from the ground a huge nuptial nest around which it plants and makes bloom flowers of the same color as itself. The blue flowers surround the sumptuous nest so that seduced, a female does not take long to arrive. So the bird destroys the nest and builds a very small one. Now he fears predators. I garden in red. Carnivorous or organic plants begin to grow, lianas seize the light and crawl up to the sky. Flowers grow in the shape of noses. In Japanese, the nose is called Ana and it is also the Japanese name of the flower sown in Alice's garden. A new body seeks to emerge and from the other side of the mirror, shows the end of the born.

Cosmogarden by Camille Fallen, 1997