Untitled 2012

Aki Kuroda made this painting with what looks like acrylic on canvas, but you never know, right? The large blocks of colour, baby blue, bubblegum pink, and black, form a kind of stage where the artist, or us, stands, ready to perform. Then there’s this tiny white figure, a person, maybe, or a ghost? I imagine Aki Kuroda starting with the blue, pink, and black, building up this foundation, almost like a Rothko, but then bam!, disrupting it with this little person. Maybe he wanted to see what would happen if he placed a figure in an abstract field like that. You can almost hear Kuroda asking himself what the relationship between the abstract background and the figure could be, and if he could disrupt the quiet tension of abstraction with a bit of figuration. It's like a painter's dare, right?