Galerie Claude Lemand

18 September 2015

MANABU KOCHI . Art Paris Art Fair 2015 .

MANABU KOCHI . Art Paris Art Fair 2015 - Galerie Claude Lemand - Booth B16 .

Claude Lemand.
Born in 1954 in Okinawa, Japan, Manabu KOCHI finished his training in Italy and came to live in Paris in 1981. Working in the fields of sculpture, painting and engraving, he has succeeded in creating a personal link between Primitive Arts and the most innovative movements in European Modern Art. His works are full of philosophy, humour, colour and harmony.

François Monnin.
Manabu Kochi’s spirited, witty art, ranging over the enormous variety of styles with cosmopolitan ease, is clearly postmodernist. … His figures are bizarre hybrids of incongruous human and natural parts, ironically yet lovingly reconciled in a way reminiscent of Miro and Klee, and his tondos are literally globes, cosmic landscapes, every part of which is equally valid. … Kochi’s images on the small slate blackboards children use to draw on are particularly delightful marvels of his playfulness. Like all of his works, they are rich with references to art history and popular culture, given an ironic twist as well as tender loving care.

Donald Kuspit. Like all Kochi’s hybrid individuals, it is a simultaneously living being and a weird object, part crystalline geometry, part organic matter. What seems particularly important about them is that they integrate two orders of knowledge: intimate “acquaintance knowledge” and abstract “about knowledge,” as William James calls them. They are typically opposed, but Kochi makes them complementary. That is, he creates a double perspective on his individual, extending the “simultaneity” that began in Cubism: a personal, close up, concrete, colourfully experience of it and a detached universal view of it, that is, a “survey” and “conceptualization” of it from a distance overhead. It is as though we are simultaneously seduced by the individual and looking at a map of it.

For that is ultimately what Kochi shows us: familiar forms emerging from and dissolving back into a cosmic force-field, signalled by dynamic allows and swirling forms he often uses. The material objects are transient appearances in a field of eternal energy, which is Koch’s true theme. It manifests itself in material fragments, and is always on the move. Kochi ecstatically swims in it. He achieves the proverbial oceanic experience, but he does not want to lose control completely - be carried along blindly by its current – which is why his figures, for all their fluid and fragmentary character, are rigorously conceived.” (Donald KUSPIT, Manabu Kochi - Postmodernist Dreamer, New York, 1995)

Shigeo Chiba. I don’t intend to present the following statement simply as a metaphor. It is actually possible to communicate with the painting of Manabu Kochi. The power of seeing enables us commune with his work. In fact, I suspect that his painting itself seeks this communication. The images we meet there are filled with organic lines and colour full of pulsate energy. They cannot be interpreted in the historical context of modern art, including post-modern art. What they probably present to us is the imagination people have carried with them from time immemorial.”

Hideo Yamamoto.
The way Manabu Kochi forms shapes in his painting can be basically defined as “metamorphic”. For instance, a human figure turns itself into an animal or plant figure, the other way around, sometimes a combination of both. He transforms existing, concrete figures into freely open forms. His painting is based on ancient and modern transformation myths, which reflect the way shapes in our lived reality must endlessly transform. It is the “light” that enables this eternal metamorphosis. Light, like the maternal oceanic, gives life varied forms and allow them to live within its realm. While these forms, in the richness of light, continue to metamorphose forever…”

Manabu Kochi.
It can be said that my Expression is a kind of manifestation of Energy; this is generated by Harmony of changing Diversities. This Energy including both spiritual and material meanings can be generated when any kind of form and colour completes the Harmony. This Harmony, I mean, is that the original individuality of each form and colour can co-exist with other Diversities, but at the same time can emphasize more its original individuality.
It is because of the existence of the Diversities that its original individuality can be flourishing further. For example, in the world where there is only blue colour, the identity of the blue can not exist. We can recognize the blue colour simply because of the existence of other colours and by composing with other colours. We can make the blue to be more flourishingly blue. Therefore, one colour is not the absolute and lonely existence, and its identity can be formed by co-existence of the Diversities. Any colour, any form, without limitation, I am trying to catch them on their ever changing aspects which can be seen at moment to moment, breathing together, to form them to my expression. Since these changing Diversities would provoke my spirituality, I can always create new and unique art of my own. I believe that this might be the reason of the freshness of my expression.
And since my expression is the manifestation of energy, it could have a continuous and stable universality. This is the base of my art. This manifestation of Energy and the Harmony of ever changing Diversities, both should be unified and should be on the same level in my art.