Galerie Claude Lemand

Manabu KOCHI. Spring Artist.
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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.
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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.

Claude Lemand. Doctor in com­par­a­tive lit­er­a­ture, former uni­ver­sity pro­fessor, col­lector since 1981, gallery owner and art pub­lisher in Paris since 1988, impor­tant donor with his wife France to the museum of the Institut du monde Arabe in Paris, researcher and exhi­bi­tion curator.