Galerie Claude Lemand

25 February 2024

Manabu KOCHI. Spring Artist.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/18nHVV4zm-PjNmgUdYrRHnSI1iaRKHT-h/view
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Solo exhibition of recent Paintings and Sculptures.
March-April 2024
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Visits: everyday, only by appointment.
clemand@orange.fr . +336 7377 0589

GALERIE CLAUDE LEMAND
70 avenue Jean Moulin , 75014 PARIS .
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Manabu KOCHI. Spring Artist
By Claude Lemand

I am delighted to be able to celebrate the 35th anniversary of the founding of my gallery in Paris and the 35th anniversary of my first encounter with the artist Manabu Kochi, with an exhibition of a selection of his recent paintings and sculptures, under a title that sums up his positive vision of the world and humanity: Manabu Kochi. Artist of Spring. The highly creative inspired forms and vibrant, vivid colours of his work are an expression of his way of living in the world, always positive, despite the darkness of human history - of which he is well aware.

From my first meeting in Paris in December 1988, with Manabu and Midori his wife, the artist told me: "I am more for harmony than for conflict, for harmony between all living beings: the variety is source of wealth and the search for purity is illusory, because it leads to fanaticism.” This reflection is a manifesto of his universalist and pacifist philosophy, opposed to all dictatorship and all war, which can only lead to destruction, death and misfortune, as was the case in Japan and on the island of Okinawa where he is from.

From the first time we met, I was captivated by his work and his endearing personality. Since then, we have not left each other’s side, forging links between our two families and establishing an ongoing creative intellectual and aesthetic dialogue. In my gallery, in international fairs, museums and through the media, I have done my best to highlight the paintings, the sculptures and the graphic works, which he was able to develop and enrich from year to year, through multiple variations of themes, of forms and on various media.

In recent years, Manabu Kochi has gone through a long and difficult period due to the cancer that struck him. He has come through it with courage and determination, like a test of a regenerative fire. His personality emerged even stronger and more universal, his art was renewed and deepened: he is now embracing the expression, through appropriate artistic and personal means, not only of the harmony and beauty of the World, but also new feelings in his work: his empathy in the face of any tragic event, his anger in the face of injustices, crimes, torture and massacres past and present, without ever forgetting to sing the forms and colors of hope and announcement of the rebirth of an Eternal Spring, which he has always felt and defined himself as the Artist of Spring.

During the two years of confinement due to Covid, Manabu Kochi succeeded to create a fabulous body of works - which I will have the opportunity to exhibit and publish under the generic title "Painting and Poetry" -, made up of large watercolors and artists’ books, results of his dialogue with the texts of Marguerite Yourcenar (The Last Love of Prince Genji), Claude Aveline (Portrait of The Non-Existent-Bird, Monologue for a Disappeared, Dead Time) and the two great Japanese haiku poets (Matsuo Basho and Kobayashi Issa).

I am happy and proud to testify that Manabu Kochi is a great artist, because he rose to the historical challenges that I had proposed to him to take on in recent years, with admirable paintings to express his emotion and his solidarity in the face of the fire at Notre-Dame de Paris in April 2019, then the fire at the Shuri castle in Okinawa and in the face of the explosions at the port of Beirut in August 2020. They will be published in the general monograph that the gallery will dedicate in November 2024, along with the visuals of his main works (paintings on canvas, paintings on paper, sculptures in unique painted pieces and sculptures in limited edition in bronze), his Autobiography, comments on his works and texts from various contributors.

CLAUDE LEMAND. Doctor in comparative literature, former university professor, collector since 1981, gallery owner and art publisher in Paris since 1988, important donor with his wife France to the museum of the Institut du monde arabe in Paris, researcher and exhibition curator.