Kukoff

LE CROISEMENT DE LA CLARTE

What if painting could heal us? In the sense that it would appease, would restore confidence, that it would have the ability to lull dark feelings… The current era speaks a lot of immersion. Well, painting could provide such experiences. We would thus dive into the blue of Klein, into the yellows of Van Gogh, we would gorge ourselves with the oranges of Stael and then we would come to the whites of Kukoff. In short, therapeutic, like the fibers of akussa, this bark which is used to wash the body, but also to treat it. Light is good for many things. It helps restore good humor and see things clearly.


twenty years ago, when he began this journey of painting, Koffi Kugbé remembers having been like many artists, in his confrontation with the canvas. “It was a very passionate report. I wanted to capture everything, I didn't understand well, but I put a lot of action." The result was a complex painting, which abounded in forms, and which filled the canvas to the brim. To the point of suffocating him, he says with hindsight. In 2005, he moved away. It's like taking a path and opening up a landscape. At the beginning, you look in front of your feet and then the gaze widens, and there comes something bigger.

Kukoff is a singular man. In the sense that his canvas is a field of slow experimentation. Why slow? because it discovers itself in its own movement. Nothing stops in her, she does not really fix the moment, she is the vibration of this moment. Let's just say, like the light in a tree, which dissolves the form, the color, which floods it and nourishes it, brings it back to life, brightens it or darkens it. It is enough for the orientation of the sun to change by one millimeter. “I am interested in that, in color, caught in the movement of light, in this whirlwind that gives movement. Nothing is static anymore. The composition loses its importance, the form no longer organizes the painting. Perhaps to try to capture what organizes... and that we do not see. The All that is behind this reality. “


Kukoff's paintings speak only of that. Our lives. The subject is profoundly humanist… Women seated, children walking, portraits no doubt, in everyday moments, the shade of a tree, against a white wall, in front of a shore. Faces do not appear, but is identity so important? The particular is incidental.


If you look at life in this way, without stopping at the immediate din, painting becomes therapeutic. It offers a new, relative objectivity, with no ambition other than to capture the electric and invisible particles of our vitality. In all its everyday beauty.
At this point in the conversation, Kossi Homawoo simply says. “The search for well-being. The light, the switch that you plug in.” He holds Kukoff as an essential element, able to stimulate creation and the soothing use of it. First impressions yielded amazing results. The translucency of the Plexiglas is in perfect harmony with the light sources, that of the outside (day) and that of the inside (LED). The darkness dissipates. It is nothing but a light and it is essential.


Roger Calmé (ZO mag’)