Kei Mitsuuchi, CARNE MIA

Room 16
Invited by Gianriccardo Piccoli

Kei Mitsuuchi was a key figure in the last years of Giovanni Testori’s critical career. The writer had seen his drawings exhibited in a Parisian gallery and immediately encouraged him to embark on increasingly challenging projects, creating a large cycle on the Passion of Christ. This culminated in the exhibition organised in 1985 at the church of San Carlo al Corso in Milan (today three of these large canvases are kept in the parish of San Carlo in Novate Milanese). Kei Mitsuuchi, born in Kochi, Japan, in 1948, works on the themes of the Passion, making his own image the model for all the protagonists of the scenes: a radical, powerful involvement that eliminates all distance between the artist and the story of the episode.
“What drives an artist to make himself the only possible figure for all the images and personae he intends to paint? – Testori asked himself in the introduction to the catalogue of the exhibition – It may be that, if not the impossible answer, some glimmer that illuminates the question, perhaps to further enlighten it, is going to give it precisely the Mitsuchian obsession to be him, and him alone, all the figures and all the personae of his Christic tragedy; given that no one, or almost no one, wanted him and wants him as a “companion”; certainly not the societas of the intellects, which is the most improbable and cruel. How can the immensity of solitude be populated by a damned man who lives in her and only in her? If, then, that damned man (as Kei painfully and explicitly affirms) has, as the first spring to signify his existence, the “need to expiate”, what will happen? Who is he going to pillory if not himself, even if he has to paint a prince or a king?”.

Kei Mitsuuchi was born in 1948 in Kochi, Japan. He moved to Paris in 1969. He has been missing for years and has not been heard from since.