Les champs verts,1980
oil on canvas
The Champs Verts represents, as the title indicates, fields, the countryside. Kimura's work is full of landscapes of the countryside, a motif that he likes to explore all the possibilities of light and color. It is through them that he expresses his landscapes and the forms that compose them. Here, the fields are represented by the different shades of green. A simple black line drawing, on the right of the composition, represents some trees, whose trunks and thick foliage can be guessed. Below, the painter represents what looks like a man and an animal. The treatment of these figures is bold, although drawn by a simple line, their color blending into those of the surrounding fields. The "green fields" are represented only through color, applied in a way that frees itself from the form. They take up all the space of the canvas, delimited in the upper right corner by the grey-blue sky. Finally, an element that links the earth and the sky, a river, seen in the center of the canvas, of a very light sky blue, running along what looks like a boundary
We can see how color is of prime importance to Kimura; the whole canvas is built around it. He does not favor the clarity of a drawn composition, but the feeling, the feeling of the colors: therefore, they melt together, there is no precision in the color, but a kind of continuity even in the change. It is not really possible to precisely describe the delimitation between the different colors, nor that between the sky and the earth. Kimura paints a landscape that he sees as a whole. Kimura's use of color comes from his interest in the Nabis; from this point of view, Kimura's color palette, mixing bold colors and pastels, is reminiscent of Bonnard's.