The Prince & Princess Art Gallery presents, in addition to a collection of paintings by Akira Kitô covering the period from 1954 to 1972, several sculptures by his son Sébastien. This exhibition opens an artistic dialogue between a father and a son, a dialogue which could not be held during the lifetime of Akira Kitô, the father, and which resonates today, on this occasion, in a magical way, by the setting perspective of their works. This dialogue is very moving because, as in the Japanese tradition, the family ties are filled with respect and devotion of the son for the father, feelings which are clearly reflected in this dialogue. “Akira Kitô, born in Japan in 1925, stayed and worked in Paris between 1953 and 1970, when he returned to Japan, never to come back until his death in 1994. Son and grandson of traditional artists recognized by the Imperial court of Japan, Kitô had come to be formed in Western art and modern art in particular by studying first at the School of Fine Arts in Paris from 1953 to 1957. We can also suppose that, like many young Japanese artists, he came to Paris as much to emancipate himself from the tradition, which is more family-oriented in his case, as to discover modern and "avant-garde" art - living art in a way . As soon as he left school, he became active - both through his own production and through his involvement in the bustling artistic life of the time. His first paintings of the years 1955 and 1956 testify to his admiration for Paul Klee, for Dubuffet, for naive or falsely naive artists. These are apparently childish paintings like My sister is dead or My car but which do not mislead on the great know-how of their author in the drawing and the subtle treatment of the color on very worked grounds - which will remain his mark. ". These "childishness" are immediately very close to the works of Cobra, in particular Appel, but with more muted and less vibrant colors. We also feel a more thoughtful, less spontaneous and less expressionist pictorial culture - in short, an impressive pictorial mastery in such a young artist, without conceding anything to academicism. Immediately Kitô therefore has his own style and manner, both primitive and refined, spontaneous and controlled. Quite quickly, Kitô mixed this "modern" European inspiration with signs and figures from both his native country, Japan, and primitive and indigenous arts, always with the same kinship with Klee. In the years 1958-1960, Akira Kitô achieved a subtle and strong synthesis between heterogeneous vocabularies thanks to a consummate technique. Whether he is painting a Mask, a Japanese or a Dragon, we are dealing on a small surface (generally formats of 70 cm by 50) with a simple composition on deep, dense and worked backgrounds. The signs that structure the composition are primordial signs that can come from Japanese culture but, for us, just as many imaginary archetypes, like those found at the same time in Miro or Appel. The atmosphere is mysterious and magical. It should be remembered in this regard that the painter's surname, Kitô, means in Japanese "devil's head". The titles speak for themselves: Amulet, Black Dream, Mythological Woman. Sometimes with a melancholy personal connotation: Self-portrait, Solitude, even if humor is very often present. Subsequently, during the 1960s, the signs tended to disseminate or form more complicated networks (Despair, City, the Deserted Island). The reference to Hundertwasser with whom Kitô was very close is obvious - but it should be noted that the exchange between the two friends was reciprocal. However, Kitô keeps his gray and muffled palette, without making his friend's colorful carnival his own. Kitô then happily brings together Cobra humor, the false naivety of Dubuffet and Japanese demons. The story for us stops there because suddenly, for reasons difficult to know and probably more personal than pictorial, the painter returns to Japan, where he will continue in the same style but for the Japanese public. Curious turnaround after an intense period of engagement in Parisian artistic life: as if the strength of the origins could not be denied indefinitely or even indefinitely suspended. The unfortunate effect of this turnaround or comeback is that we lack a complete vision of the artist and his art, but Kitô's "maverick" side comes out even better. There is savagery and excess in this cultivated and subtle artist. The relay comes with his son Sébastien Kito (I will drop the spelling ô), who is himself a Franco-Japanese artist "in his own right", if one can express himself thus without it being laughable, since Sébastien Kito was born in France in 1963 and has worked there continuously since. Like his father, he was a student at the School of Fine Arts - and, ironically or not, in the studio of an artist who was first Cobra, I mean Alechinsky. Although he worked with Raymond Hains as an assistant for more than ten years, he was able to develop a practice of sculptor all his own, which is the antipodes of the expressive fantasies of Cobra, the antipodes of calligraphy, materialism and mythology. Add that it took resistance to work with Hains while preserving his own voice. Sébastien Kito's sculpture is made of simple, hollowed-out and "transparent" shapes, which can be seen through the eyes and even physically traversed in the case of the larger ones. They lightly divide the space and fit into it like life-size drawings. The shapes are legibly obtained by cutting the interior surfaces which are then folded and extended / developed outward. If there is something Japanese here, it is the echo of origami, the art of folding paper, here applied to metals and glasses. The colors are simple, as offered in the trade (red, yellow, blue, pink), unless Kito retains the color of the metal, of the tin, of the industrially tinted glasses, of the material. They stop the gaze on their form and then let it pass through her. If there is a "modern" kinship to note, it is that with Calder but without the "mobile" dimension. The joints are often made of hinges which indicate the possibility of several positions - even that of folding the sculpture. It is important to emphasize that Sébastien Kito works at very different scales, from the small discreet sculpture that is placed on a piece of furniture to the sculpture for the outdoor space, through the interior sculptures that fit well in the design of living spaces. There is something original here, between minimalism, motionless kinetics, conceptual project and even design, for example for the colored prisms so enigmatic that they seem to come from some other planet. The biggest compliment we can pay Sébastien Kito is that his sculpture manages to be ageless: it does not respond to the clichés (essentially naturalistic or technological) of contemporary production, but neither does it have no more visibly dependent relationship to the past. She is herself as she is. It is not so common and produces a refreshing effect of disorientation without exoticism on the eyes. »Yves Michaud on January 10, 2016