Aki Kuroda by Camille Fallen - The Figures

Figures by Camille Fallen, 2002

Finally, in the back and forth of the nights beating the rhythm of the Disconti/NUIT/é – Night was never the same twice – lights and colors were born. Black itself, "spaced out" from one night to the next, has become "iterable," and iterability is what links otherness (or alteration) to repetition, or even , identity to difference . It is the coming of the Other to the heart of the Same.

The canvas turned blue.

“I had to paint thicker white lines to calm the blue, the lines shook and the figures were born. »

Calming the blue, the violence of the blue: Bleu Magma. Blue is a blaze. The heat of the universe is not white. She is not red. Nor yellow. Neither orange. She is blue. The feature that “calms” her is the birth of life, light and figures. They arrive “trembling”. Like love.

And the canvas is torn to reveal the figures, vibrant, threatened or survivors of more than one cataclysm. The light was announced and the Noctambule was going to give way to the tightrope walker perhaps, to the one who dances "above the abyss (1)". The line no longer searches the palimpsest of the nights. The first figures, bent and broken in the heart of disasters suspended for a moment (L'ultima Notte a Pompeii, Atlantide...) still oscillate, they hesitate and shudder, no longer between white and black, day and night , but between their survival and their disappearance now exposed on the surface. They are broken, to the South, to the North. Space disarticulates them. The canvas defeats them. Time is "off its hinges". The figures waver at the heart of an instant that dismantles the clock and belies it, it's a spiral, a shock wave that breaks the circle and the line, bends time in space and mixes the before, after, now and between a cyclone, an earthquake, a disaster and a stupefaction.

Around the same time, Aki Kuroda had a dream.

“A long, beautiful leg emerges from the lake. I approach to save this body which abandons itself to the waters of the lake like a mermaid. I take him in my arms. My heart throbs. This body is my father's. In my arms, he is like a Pieta. Suddenly, a blue and purple flame arises and consumes him. It flames and vanishes in an atmosphere of ecstasy. I woke up. I thought: my father is dead”.

Ecstasy, at the cost of death and love woven together in a blue-purple enjoyment enters the work. From there, desire and memory will be transfigured. The figures cross the lake, the paintings announce it. Their bodies break, break, they vibrate, lines and streaks sparkle.

The metamorphosis then continues in light or frenzied trances, the figures contort, they bend to the rhythm of music that we cannot hear: joy little by little begins to spring up and with it the colors sing and sing. affirm. They dare beauty and dance. Cine Citta, Swing. They approach ecstasy.

But isn't it still a masquerade, a cinema that they make between cataclysm and desire to live? Wouldn't the figures be entertained in the dazzling colors as in the imminence or aftermath of another apocalypse? Yes, but which one?

“What I want is to go to the other side. »

This time, consumed by ecstasy, the body disappeared as such. Unless it has become the body that represents ecstasy. We are on the other side of the lake and the night. The trace of this passage is the figures which no longer appear except in their outlines, open and bare. They are the body past or to be reborn that this dazzled dream will have dissipated. Their cutting is precise. They are like big empty gaps, they open space like doors, they let the possibilities waver, call our bodies with their absent bodies. Sometimes, a wing pushes them – a single, equivocal, ambiguous one – and they play the angel: is this single wing the sign of their future flight or that of a future decline? Sometimes a tear splits them from top to bottom and they only appear in the spacing and the breathing of the color. Other times again, they are there, tiny, progressing on the line, lost in the color: because it is possible to get lost in a color like in the heart of a night. The tables show it: Green where? is one of the titles of this strange metaphysics. A meta-physics of color. A feeling of disturbing strangeness (Das Unheimliche (2) green, yellow, red or white seizes us. A vertigo too. But the figures then come back to us, in other paintings, insolent, magnificent, immense, showing their empty bodies loaded of presences, supported by the colors or supporting them, ready to face everything, shouting the future at the top of their voices: radiant caryatids.

They live in an impossible moment. Paroxysmal. The place where they stand is the acme of a momentum arrested at the moment of the fall, the ecstatic point where high and low threaten to suddenly reverse, where they begin to resemble and panic. The dizziness repeats itself constantly, the moment when at every moment we fall. But the fall does not occur. The figure is stopped in restraint, it cuts the heart of this contradictory, vibrant, alternating, wavering, trembling moment.

On the summit the abyss.
This is the moment when ecstasy amazes: like the star.
But the downfall is coming. Another fall. As we do not know it.

Figures by Camille Fallen, 2002

1. About Kuroda's painting, Lacoue-Labarthe, in a nod to Nietzsche concludes: “It happens to Aki Kuroda to also say that his painting is “light”. It's possible. Yet I know few who give the impression of the abyss to such an extent. Would he suggest that he dance over the abyss? » Exhibition catalogue, Galerie Maeght, 1989, Paris.
2. What to say when the “disturbing strangeness” becomes color?