REIJIRO KUDO       工藤 礼二郎

Looking is very mysterious experience. We cover our eyes when we are scared of something in front of us.

Because we are afraid of that the horrible thing may invade our mind if we keep opening our eyes.

If I don’t cover my eyes, some horrible thing, in other words, other person may attack, destroy and loose me.

No problem will happen without looking at it. Looking at the painting, it means that I accept other’s invasion which should be the scary objects, and expect to be reborn after being destroyed. I’m moved and decentralized by looking at painting. It means that I am impressed.

Other’s sensibility invades my sensibility.

In the works of REIJIRO KUDO, while I am looking at them, what I didn’t perceive appears successively even if everything has already existed on his painting. I wonder if everything was painted and existed there from the beginning, or the illusion was created in looking at his painting. It seems that something which exists on the outside actually I am looking at appears from the depth of my unconscious mind.

That is why I am deeply impressed by his painting.

My sensibility is decentralized by other’s as the illusion and the unconscious. In this way, the paintings of KUDO appear between something exists and anything doesn’t exist there, or between something exists on the outside and is produced in my mind.

In other words, the painting is experienced in the creation, extinction and conflict between the visible and the invisible.

Visible and invisible. They were the main theme of modern abstract paintings.

In the initial stage of abstract painting, the artists are tried to explain anything immaterial and spiritual apart from the material and sensible world.

They challenged Aporia to explain something invisible and spiritual with the color and shape visible and sensible. It is not a painting without the color and shape visible, on the other hand, it is not spiritual as long as visible.

There are two methods to resolve this problem. One of them is that the artist makes flat the space of painting, and then minimalize the color and the shape visible as long as he can. The another is to use the color and shape as the minimum elements. The former is Kasimir Malevich (Russia), and the latter is Piet Mondorian (Holland), He appears the spiritual thing invisible on the critical point of the sense.

The method of KUDO is different with both of them. He doesn’t make flat the space of painting or minimalize the color, on the contrary, he uses a lot of color.

He repeats painting again and again with various layers of color, and that cause the discord of the fusion and a way of colors. The colors appear and disappear at the same time. He turns off color by using colors.

But how does he treat the shape?

The form is updated by repeating the creation and extinction, in each time he paints on the same shape as the canvas. We should call it “the field”, as this shape unified with the canvas is very different from the drawing on the canvas.

In pouring a variety of colors, he makes his painting invisible as individual color and shape by mixing them in obvious and conceal, creation and extinction.

As a result, he creates the space coexisting with the light and dark in the color, with emptiness and fulfill in the shape.

I feel that it looks like breathing and living as it is repeating the creation and the extinction in concern with my sensibility and other’s.

Other’s sensibility moves me looking at paintings.

In the same way, other’s invasion like light and dark, fulfill and emptiness shakes and decentralizes the color and shape too. In result we can call them no longer color nor shape.