Aki Kuroda - By Olivier Kaeppelin

Aki Kuroda’s Field of Shards

In Aki Kuroda’s work, there is an ardor, a joy in experiencing the power and freedom of movement that the line offers us... The white, black, or colored lines he draws. He trusts them as both gesture and principle. He moves away from any fixed position, from paralyzing straight lines. His approach to space is not that of a plane but of a rhythm. From his first exhibitions in France, Marguerite Duras was sensitive to this energy, this "sonority" evoking that of the wind that carries and disperses. This swirling expansion, these aerial graphs, white against a night background, change into the colors of the rainbow. They are ephemeral shivers. They constantly relaunch themselves, creating not objects but passages, lights that the eye seeks to follow. They arouse a desire for surprise, where the viewer becomes a lookout. He "hunts," drawn along a path to decipher: perhaps that of a labyrinth in search of an incarnation, as we understand in his dialogue with Pascal Quignard about the Minotaur. Theseus, here a painter and hunter, confronts the archetype of a monster-form, the Greek Asterion like the Japanese "Yokai." This form generates figures of animal and human chimeras, strange humanoids, anthropomorphic architectures, science fiction characters, or media mythologies. In doing so, he avoids symbolic rhetorics in favor of choreographies where we find the power of the line, that of museum art as well as that of comic strips. Aki Kuroda creates a fauna where, if he doesn't forget, for example, Albrecht Dürer's hare inhabited by light, it transforms into an energetic actor, a dancing rabbit. Agile, fast, ironic, he is a hybrid who plays with himself.

Aki Kuroda directly confronts this polymorphic nature through portraits, which are often self-portraits close to the monster-forms mentioned. They evoke anxiety, tightrope walkers between composition and decomposition, made of colorful violence building and erasing faces, brushstrokes scarring the face to simultaneously bring it into being and make it disappear. They thus carry us into multiple lives, those of this "essential chimera" that is the coupling of reality and painting.

Aki Kuroda is a player. While he uncompromisingly confronts us with the human condition, following in the footsteps of Soutine, Kirchner, and Schmidt-Rottluff, he does not forget to remind us that he is also a companion to a mischievous animal like his "rabbit," oblivious to the passage of time and old age, which the painter now questions.

Aki Kuroda is 80 this year. While he has long known that art is a challenge against time, he does not approach it "face to face" but in a war of movement made of mutations, evasions, and astonishments. Throughout his work, he creates pitfalls, traps to awaken, "reawaken" our intelligence and our senses. In a single exhibition, he leads us from one territory to another. We dance with him, from one foot to the other, from one sensation to another "in-between" as in that mysterious line by Guillaume Apollinaire, joyful and painful at the same time: "My glass broke like a burst of laughter." These shards build his work, in a dissemination of seeds that give it life. He uses all useful means: painting, engraving, drawing, sculpture... All pictorial materials, from gouache to ink. And as for this ink, there is, in his work, the recurring presence of writing, from a poem's phrase, an enumeration of numbers, to revisited poster variations, graffitied with the revealing words "Just for fun," "Passage," or "Space City." In his work, the world manifests itself at every moment. In science, which has always fascinated him, as in philosophy and their theories of space. From them, he designed installations or performances that I vividly remember, such as Cristal Hasard with Johanes von Saurma and Joel Borges, or choreographies where he revisited the "Ballets Russes" and Parade by Erik Satie and Jean Cocteau with Angelin Preljocaj.

I cite these works because they are significant of Aki Kuroda's passion for the polymorphy of creations and especially, as we have said, for that of astronomy which, in addition to the love he feels for the night, the shimmering and forging of constellations, allows him to interpret the cosmos for which he has built a Cosmogarden which, beyond surfaces and signs, is a mental garden of wonders.

Aki Kuroda, with the figures he draws, the colors he makes burst onto the canvas, like stars or red flowers, never abandons the idea of moving, through painting, into a space beyond where everything is discovered. Very often, you will see his archetypal character Silhouette, a Matissean profile comparable to A.R. Penck's Standart brut, move towards the back of the painting where geometry suggests a "threshold," a door towards which he guides us. Amidst the clutter, the troubles, and the fires of the world, he reminds us, once again with Apollinaire: that "it is high time to relight the stars."

Olivier Kaeppelin