Galerie Claude Lemand

Claude Lemand. Born in Okinawa, Japan, in 1954, artist Manabu Kochi com­pleted his studies at the School of Fine Arts of Florence and set­tled in France in 1981. The poetic, joyful and col­orful char­acter of his paint­ings and sculp­tures strongly appealed to me from our first meeting in December 1988. Sculptor, painter and engraver, he has suc­ceeded in devel­oping a per­sonal uni­verse, a syn­thesis between prim­i­tive arts and the most inno­va­tive and pos­i­tive modern European trends. His post-modern work is imbued with phi­los­ophy and humor, color and har­mony. Thanks to the Claude and France Lemand Donation in October 2018, the col­lec­tions of the Museum of the Arab World Institute in Paris are rich in a very impor­tant col­lec­tion of works by Manabu Kochi.

Claude Lemand. Manabu Kochi. Spring Artist.

I am delighted to cel­e­brate the 38th anniver­sary of the founding of my gallery in Paris and the 38th anniver­sary of my first encounter with the artist Manabu Kochi, by exhibiting a selec­tion of his recent paint­ings and sculp­tures, under a title that aptly sum­ma­rizes his pos­i­tive vision of the world and humanity: Manabu Kochi. Artist of Spring. The highly cre­ative and inspired forms and the vibrant, lively colors of his works express his ever-pos­i­tive way of living in the world, despite the dark­ness of human his­tory – of which he is well aware. His Buddhist beliefs, rooted in Japanese tra­di­tion, in the unity of all living beings and the har­mony of the uni­verse, which per­me­ated his child­hood and youth on the island of Okinawa, seem to be the source of his phe­nom­enal, inven­tive imag­i­na­tion, cre­ating count­less hybrid beings in a cosmic and eternal uni­versal meta­mor­phosis that pro­duces such a wealth of life forms. It is beyond all human imag­ining!

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, which is the greatest source of wealth; 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 and Monologue for a Vanished Man) 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 plans to ded­i­cate to him in 2028, - to cel­e­brate the 40th anniver­sary of its foun­da­tion and of our meeting, - with visuals of his main works (paint­ings on canvas, paint­ings on paper, unique painted sculp­tures and sculp­tures pro­duced in bronze), his Autobiography, com­ments on his works and texts from var­ious con­trib­u­tors.
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Françoise Monnin. "Far from the dis­en­chanted doubts expressed by post-modern visual artists, the work of Manabu Kochi asserts itself as an always spon­ta­neous and renewed pro­fes­sion of faith, a daring quest for fun­da­mental energy. Kochi is a Artist of Spring. Manifestos for Hope, its drawn pat­terns and mod­eled vol­umes evoke births: seeds, germs, buds, the first stages of evo­lu­tion. The appear­ance of tender and embry­onic con­cre­tions of cer­tain sculp­tures whis­pers the poetry of Hans Arp. The playful eroti­cism of their poly­chrome curves some­times joy­fully recalls the mis­chievous look of the pro­tu­berant mor­pholo­gies invented by Miro. Aquatic and cosmic, this world speaks of flex­i­bility and silence. Around the island of Okinawa, fauna and flora with eye­lashes, ten­ta­cles and antennae gently swayed in the East China Sea. When you are born an islander, freedom comes through water and air. “I am not a sym­bolist. I am not looking for meaning, but for all the forms that I like. » Kochi spon­ta­neously gen­er­ates visions and care­fully safe­guards his childish wonder."
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Donald Kuspit. “Like all Kochi’s hybrid indi­vid­uals, it is a simul­ta­ne­ously living being and a weird object, part crys­talline geom­etry, part organic matter. What seems par­tic­u­larly impor­tant about them is that they inte­grate two orders of knowl­edge: inti­mate “ac­quain­tance knowl­edge” and abstract “about knowl­edge,” as William James calls them. They are typ­i­cally opposed, but Kochi makes them com­ple­men­tary. That is, he cre­ates a double per­spec­tive on his indi­vidual, extending the “si­mul­taneity” that began in Cubism: a per­sonal, close up, con­crete, colour­fully expe­ri­ence of it and a detached uni­versal view of it, that is, a “survey” and “con­cep­tu­al­iza­tion” of it from a dis­tance over­head. It is as though we are simul­ta­ne­ously seduced by the indi­vidual and looking at a map of it.

For that is ulti­mately what Kochi shows us: familiar forms emerging from and dis­solving back into a cosmic force-field, sig­nalled by dynamic allows and swirling forms he often uses. The mate­rial objects are tran­sient appear­ances in a field of eternal energy, which is Koch’s true theme. It man­i­fests itself in mate­rial frag­ments, and is always on the move. Kochi ecstat­i­cally swims in it. He achieves the prover­bial oceanic expe­ri­ence, but he does not want to lose con­trol com­pletely - be car­ried along blindly by its cur­rent – which is why his fig­ures, for all their fluid and frag­men­tary char­acter, are rig­or­ously con­ceived.” (Donald Kuspit, New York, 1995)

Hideo Yamamoto. “I don’t intend to pre­sent the fol­lowing state­ment simply as a metaphor. It is actu­ally pos­sible to com­mu­ni­cate with the painting of Manabu Kochi. The power of seeing enables us com­mune with his work. In fact, I sus­pect that his painting itself seeks this com­mu­ni­ca­tion. The images we meet there are filled with organic lines and colour full of pul­sate energy. They cannot be inter­preted in the his­tor­ical con­text of modern art, including post-modern art. What they prob­ably pre­sent to us is the imag­i­na­tion people have car­ried with them from time immemo­rial.” (Hideo Yamamoto, Tokyo, 1997)

Shigeo Chiba. “The way Manabu Kochi forms shapes in his painting can be basi­cally defined as “meta­mor­phic”. For instance, a human figure turns itself into an animal or plant figure, the other way around, some­times a com­bi­na­tion of both. He trans­forms existing, con­crete fig­ures into freely open forms. His painting is based on ancient and modern trans­for­ma­tion myths, which reflect the way shapes in our lived reality must end­lessly trans­form. It is the “light” that enables this eternal meta­mor­phosis. Light, like the maternal oceanic, gives life varied forms and allow them to live within its realm. While these forms, in the rich­ness of light, con­tinue to meta­mor­phose forever…” (Shigeo Chiba, Tokyo, 1997)

Public Collections:
– Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Cabinet des Estampes, Paris.
– Collection Novotel d’art con­tem­po­rain, France.
– Musée de plain air, Golf de l’Amirauté, Deauville, France.
– Musée munic­ipal, Bailleul, France.
– Musée munic­ipal, Oita, Japon.
– Musée d’art con­tem­po­rain d’Okinawa, Japon.
– Bibliothèque d’art, University of Okinawa, Japon.
– Musée d’art, Sakima, Japon.
– Fundación Museo del Grabado Español Contemporáneo, Marbella, Espagne.
– Palm Hills Golf resort, Japon.
– Paris. Museum, Institut du monde arabe, Paris. Donation Claude & France Lemand 2018.
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