Katsuji KISHIDA

Katsuji Kishida is a sculptor, born in 1937 in Tokyo, and settled in Paris in 1970. His sculptures have an upward allure and aspire to monumentality, collected on their cracked and stitched bark, braided with plates sometimes crowned with lamelliform units, arc -propped on a stabilizing spine: it is always the monochrome painted steel that lends its split epidermis to the syncopated combinations of KISHIDA. Between structural backwash and regulating geometry, Eastern tradition and Western advances, KISHIDA digs his own path with authority, translating what he feels deep within himself. In 2013, he had the Gianadda Foundation, Academy of Fine Arts, Institut de France. KISHIDA is a metal sculptor. The gallery presents around twenty sculptures in steel, bronze and stainless steel. His fascination with metal and flame has continued for over 50 years. “The red color of the works is wanted by Kishida. It is the color of what oxidizes, the color of brown earth, of metal that rusts and decomposes. In the artist there is a definite refusal to use stainless steel, a sign for him of an immobile time, that of eternity.

With red, on the contrary, it interrupts the movement of Zen meditation and sends us back to the vision of a primordial state of humanity, to a world still below good and evil, where only processes reign. violent natural conditions and where to live and die are one and the same phenomenon. the artist introduced between the exterior and the empty interior of the works. They are "the eggs of the wind", he tells us, thereby indicating that this emptiness in which the gaze can wander, is the only way of representing the existence of an infinite potentiality, of germs therefore, brought by the wind to which all the mythologies grant a fertilizing power, whether it is a question of the “breath", the “pneuma" of the Stoics or the “spirit" of which Anaxagoras speaks; germs where life still slumbers, caught between equally possible birth and death, and which can only develop by this dialectic, triumphing over rot. Finally, here are works strongly rooted in a vitalist thought and in which we hear the ample breathing of nature, as on the first morning of the world. » Extract from the text of Fernand Fournier