Aki Kuroda by Camille Fallen - Lake Takara

Lake Takara by Camille Fallen, 2002

One such place was Lake Takara in Kyoto. Aki Kuroda was six years old, and what happened there, the event that happened there without really arriving, reversed all the origins, all the starting points and it marked the inaugural gap that led us to Cosmogarden. But what happened on the surface of Lake Takara (the treasure in Japanese), what subtle, discreet, brutal and unexpected revolution so that a new vision of the universe could find its “turn” there?

Here is the story that was transmitted to us and which, to be the basis, does not seem less to us, already, as immemorial and ageless:

Aki Kuroda was on Lake Takara, in a ferry, with his father. The lake was so deep it looked black. It was dusk, between dog and wolf, and at this hour, with darkness falling like rain, all that remained of the day was its outline, an intense luminosity. The father says to the child: "Come... We are going to die... Both of us... Now..."

The child said yes.

The child said yes one day and forever. After this yes, there is no point in saying that they will not have done it. The trace of their passage to the “other side” is entirely in this yes, in this act of saying yes which is equivalent to the act itself. The father and the son will therefore be dead for a moment in the lake. Who will have stopped them at the time of this crossing? What does this stop mean? Isn't it from this decree of arrested death that we will also have to think about the work? Doesn't she hold herself in the ecstasy of this yes which for an instant delivered the body of the son and the body of the father to the dark expanse of the lake? Isn't there in Aki Kuroda's painting such a living yes, such a repeating moment, which welcomes death (of the body), suspends it, traverses it and diverts it to divert with it the stories and myths as we tell them?

This departure which is repeated and in many forms, which is allied to still other departures, and this from an origin which multiplies and which does not cease to give rise not to starting points but to lines, to new births going out, we have to face it for a moment. The time of this moment suspended. This stopped moment resembles another moment which for Abraham and Isaac was also played out between life and death. But on the waves of Lake Takara, the father did not have to kill the son and God was not the one who came to suspend the sacrifice after ordering it. Not that we know. Neither was the father sacrificed.

Neither the father nor the son only, but the father and the son: together. A reversal occurred on Lake Takara which turned the work towards an unthought. Father and son will kill each other for a moment. Both. Alone. Who gave it to the other? Has death given itself to them? What did they play? Was it a game? This impossible answer offers the work its incredible origin, the possibility for it to inaugurate another mythology, another cosmology which will keep the marks of this inaugural markdown, of this prodigious difference. And already, the suffix "logy" is dislodged from the original logos.

The work that is now coming will never stop tilting the keystones of our universe to announce another and produce it.

But before, Aki Kuroda will have had to start, that is to say start over and return in painting to the place of this origin, Lake Takara. Where the treasure is: the treasure as the origin of a new world and another cosmos.

Because one day, we will have to leave the earth.

But let's also start anew and embark on this journey from the series of the first paintings: Ténèbres. The front, the back and the other of a Fiat Lux. From now on, these paintings can be seen as before but also differently.

Lake Takara by Camille Fallen, 2002