Aki Kuroda takes the viewer on a trip from which he will not walk away. He will be condemned to rediscover life, to descend into darkness from which he will come out even more Alive. Washed. Purified. A transit to another world, in which Freud's "Unheimlichkeit" is predominant. With an art work that is on a constant knife edge between East and West, he goes further, beyond mankind, the earth, and the cosmos that he paints, sculpts, "install's", loves and mishandles in his performances. Aki Kuroda creates his work like someone from another planet. It's the work of a nomadic from another time that never stops traveling all over the world to feel better. The work of an identity that does not yet exist, coming from an island to seize another. Aki Kuroda left Japan for France to immerse himself into Greece, an unstable and moving land that looks so much like his own. Chaos, earthquakes, tremors, drownings… But as a visionary of our time, Aki Kuroda has left the earth. With the birth of "Cosmogarden", the artist protects his fetish Minotaur. Fed by friendships with the greatest philosophers, physicians and astronomers of our time, his pieces in two, three, or even four dimensions symbolize a garden where everything mingles. The king Minos, like the painter Miro, looked over his shoulder. Limitlessness of flows, multitude of sons of Arianne. Shade and light, nature and the city, the inside and the outside. The deepest inwardness of soul with cosmic immensity. In this maelstrom, between microcosm and macrocosm, where past, present and future mingle, Aki Kuroda has planted a lot to let a jungle appear, in which everything moves and sways. There goes a meteor shower, a shower of animals, of monsters and of his Minotaur machine! And there goes an avalanche of bubbles … chaos or soap? Even further than mangas and other space ships! It all explodes in performances in which the art, dancers and viewers come together for the last communion. From the imminence of disaster is born ecstasy, in the World of mazes, of Aki Kuroda's secret garden.
—Anne Kerner
Paintings
"inside out / inside in" or the dimension of man in the city, space, space-time continuum: "Cosmogarden"
Performances
The encounter of science and arts that evolves around the themes of space and time, when chance comes in: "Cosmogarden"
Aki Kuroda is one of today’s few artists still capable of creating new forms likely to provoke imagination and reflection. He creates worlds with antagonistic styles, which gives an enigmatic nature to his work and makes it fascinating…
Attracting attention with his lanky silhouettes on blue monochromatic canvases, Aki Kuroda’s pictorial work is rich in numerous creations. The intensity of his big black paintings foreshadows breath-taking works in the future. He keeps to his haunting and central theme : man’s dimension in space, in the space-time continuum, in outer space, in the universe.
Aki Kuroda is an agitator. He accepts the system but dominates it, through a self-sufficient artistic expression. He handles carefully his independence, making it inalienable by creating at the least seven different styles called “iles”. His imagination is transcended by the studio’s matrix, then culminates in the exhibition and finally in the city. The viewer also becomes an actor of the system that dominates the city because of the artist’s creative energy.
“My work’s key word is “inside out/ Outside in”… You know, I like to stroll around the city. This one invades me. And, after a while, it is my spirit that comes to it. It’s like a sort of interiority that escapes. There I can create my secret garden. It’s a place where everyday life becomes more intense, more dynamic. I am neither Japanese nor French. I am uprooted. I need to always feel like I am living in the most dynamic way with this city that is becoming more and more my subject”.
Aki Kuroda regularly stays in New York and Tokyo. His work evolves with the rhythm of these cities. He likes to confront himself to and immerse in the heart of big capital cities to develop his concept, “Cosmogarden”. Over time, “Cosmogarden and Cosmocity” have been taking a direct part in his pictorial world yet constantly revitalized. He presents daily life, restructured by his eyes, where the city, with its over-rational shapes, becomes a place for viewers and creators to meet. He pursues his experience by examining fragments of life in the city and the space where people meet with their daily routine. Aki Kuroda explores urban geography and man’s place in this complex world.
The “Cosmogarden” concept
Cosmogarden is an encounter between science and art, which orbit around the themes of Time and Space and plays on the programming of coincidence.
Being a show created in situ, Cosmogarden is an event that mixes theatrical form, video, painting, sculpture and sound, taking a leaf out of the mythical Minotaur combined with the image of the cosmic garden. The audience, placed in the center of the operation imagined by Aki Kuroda, is called out to, and invited to explore the five senses Empire, inside the maze of cosmic imagination, a garden in which each may create his own world.
Aki Kuroda invites the viewer to meet with a Minotaur, his own Minotaur and through his image, the legend of the Knossos Palace, the shape of the maze. The Japanese origins of the artist are sometimes recalled by traditional symbols at the center of the performance that face a contemporary conception of the world, which provokes a deliberate cultural contrast and introduces a moment of meditation.
Four-dimensional puzzles
These exhibitions are like four-dimensional puzzles, focused on Space, Time, Black Holes and Gravitation, creating a sort of Magma, a gravitating Sphere in which the tormented universe of speed symbolized by high-tech, that imposes its always faster rhythm, dives in black holes of traditional Japanese slowness.
Each piece of the puzzle brings up 2000 questions and changes the basis of space and time. It’s an infinite puzzle that plays with what is left of coincidence in our over-programmed society. A break with the established network of our society will permit the creation of a passage, an airlock that will make room for chance.
Brightness of speed opposed to the half-light of slowness
The programming of our society is like a well established spider’s web. Alike all programs, speed is optimized. Everything must be done as fast as possible, always more and more rapidly. In spite of everything, more opaque “network nods” survive, interconnections that open up on wastelands, crossing points, sites of resistance where differential of speed let’s coincidence happen.
“By toying with the programming of our society, I tried to create a soap bubble (a transparent sphere) a wasteland garden in which the elements that will meet will create a vibration. Inside this gravitating sphere, slowness and speed mix together, along with gravitation, time and space. It’s the system that creates himself coincidence. Three to four elements interconnected change time and movement to create something that I haven’t programmed. I’m a cosmic gardener that let’s it all grow freely.”
Download the pdf to learn more about Aki Kuroda's work.
Download the biography of Aki Kuroda.
To contact Aki Kuroda please send an email to info@cosmogarden.com.
Subscribe to the occasional newsletter to receive information about Aki Kuroda. You can unsubscribe at any time.
