Love Blue

Aki Kuroda, whose real name is Akihiko Kuroda was born on October 4, 1944 in Kyoto, Japan. His father was a professor of economics at Dōshisha University. As an only child, Aki Kuroda grew up in a family open to Western culture and particularly to European culture.

He began painting at the age of 3. At the age of 4, he already produced his first oil painting. In 1970, he moved to France. In 1978, he had his first solo exhibition in a Kunsthalle in Germany and then at the Maeght Gallery in Paris in 1980, the same year he participated in the Paris Biennale. In 1994, he exhibited at the Sao Paulo Biennale in Brazil.

In 1985, Aki Kuroda publishes the magazine Noise in which Michel Serres and Jacques Derrida participate. Since 1992, the painter conceives performance shows that he has named "Cosmogarden", he mixes different artistic forms within these live shows.

Aki Kuroda has also created murals for the Pôle universitaire Léonard de Vinci, the Maison de la culture du Japon in Paris, for the city of Paris, for the École nationale des douanes in Tourcoing and for the café of the Musée d'Art moderne et contemporain de Strasbourg.

Aki Kuroda is a multi-faceted artist: in addition to painting, he created the sets for the ballet Parade for Angelin Preljocaj at the Paris Opera and the Avignon Festival in 1993. He has also collaborated with architects such as Richard Rogers and Tadao Ando in the creation of relief paintings in Japan. Aki Kuroda's art has also inspired famous writers such as Marguerite Duras, Michel Foucault and Pascal Quignard.

The Japanese painter's paintings have a matrix composed of spaces and numbers. 1944: the year of his birth, - 270: the temperature of the deep cosmos, 300,000: the speed of light in km/s in the vacuum. Aki Kuroda has thus conceived a table of numerical laws to retranscribe the chaos of origins, while space is organized in multiple forms, spheres, puzzles, labyrinths, fragmented fields in a third and fourth dimension. In a rather progressive way, women, flowers and myths emerge and settle in his compositions.

The figures open us to a space composed of light and matter as at the beginning of time and life. Imaginary, real, irrational, whole, decomposed, the numbers spin against a background of cosmic night, their common denominator is the enumeration that advances like a thread that the eye unwinds to infinity. The complexity of Aki Kuroda's cosmos takes shape through his paintings, without frame, which couple space to time and give movement.

But paintings are only part of the Japanese artist's creations. Photographs, sculptures, installations and shows complete his creative space where everything is a garden: the body, life, the city, the cosmos.

Neither Japanese nor French, Aki Kuroda considers himself uprooted, he never stops pushing back the limits of the spaces he creates over the years.