Aki Kuroda by Camille Fallen - Darkness
Darkness by Camille Fallen, 2002
The lake was black and the beginnings never cease to be dark, beyond the light that will never dissipate Darkness. Aki Kuroda then patiently composed the palimpsest of the nights which succeeded and overlapped each other, with in between the black expanses the spacing of the white lines. And those white lineaments that tapered one night before letting themselves be covered by another, no one knew what it could be. These white lines which intercalated, which spaced out and which leafed through the black (blank pages slipped in secret) were like the breath of life and light in the dark crushing of the nights which repeated themselves tirelessly: in the Conti/NIGHT /e.
On this palimpsest, memory or origin of alternate nights, Aki Kuroda sometimes launched other gestures, white scratches that bent the line: the number of chaos, the jolt of ecstasy or the signature of chance that presides over all beginnings. The white crossed out the black, leaving a trace on the surface, a sign, lines, the outline of an itinerary, in an indecipherable writing that already announced that the nights could only be repeated thanks to the Disconti /NIGHT/é, of the interval, of the in-between of a white breath, of a change, of an event, even if it was first hidden in the folds of the work and of darkness. Repetition could only take place thanks to deviation, difference and accident.
The succeeding nights were therefore always going to be different, separated from themselves, split by the irruption of white occurring in the in-between of black like an inspiration or an expiration. The backwash of these nights interspersed with white (was this white oblivion, erasure, the past flash of a catastrophe, the repression of night, the coming of a light, the intermittent imminence of a future, the arrival of contradiction at the very heart of painting?) was already suggesting wave after wave the lake and the sea too. The Coming Sea of Cosmogarden.
And the writing that then came to cross out the canvases prefigured the birth of the figures.
“In the cosmos, everything is black. Yet there is light. It exists, it is there, but our eyes cannot see it. These white lines are this light, something that is born, life for example, and this life of beginnings is what I feel but do not see. It comes to my body like a vibration, its waves propagate in the gesture of my hand, in the movement of my brush. So it becomes painting. ".
With Ténèbres, Aki Kuroda started closest to silence, dread, night and rustling anguish. He was then a Noctambule, visiting the First Night at the peril of the colors, crossing the dark lake incessantly, without it being known whether he was entering or leaving it. It will have taken a lot of courage for him to stand there, in the suspended and wavering moment of this "die not die" which can be declined in still other tones and with other verbs like "paint not paint". , “to be born not to be born”.
But this inaugural, double, paradoxical, split instant, which harbors contradiction in its heart, this original, reversible and diachronic instant would henceforth run through the entire work and open up a new dimension to it.
To paint only when anguish and the point of desire reach their paroxysm together.
Darkness by Camille Fallen, 2002