Nobuyoshi Araki

Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato.
Through June 25

Nobuyoshi Araki’s (b.1940) most famous photographs are without a doubt his nude women tied up in ropes and hanging from the ceiling. These imagines in black and white which are elegant and have a formal sensibility neutralize partially the explicit sadistic eroticism by conveying a sophisticated interpretation in a ritual sense. These photos are not the Japanese artist’s best work and the idea is not particularly original for the artist Hans Bellmer, in the thirties, had done a series of tied up nudes that were more fascinating and disquieting.

Araki has surely looked at Bellmer’s work as well as the work of Man Ray (his nudes and more specifically the Venus restaurée in 1936, of a classical bust wrapped in rope). Trough the major anthological show presented at the Pecci Museum in Prato (curated by Bruno Corà and Filippo Maggia) one finally gets a complete and correct reading of the artist’s complex and versatile oeuvre, centered quite obviously on his obsessive passion for women and feminine eroticism. And yet that aspect of the work is only a part of a much larger "erotic" vision which involves all the vital and sensual aspects of an urban and natural reality.
In some ways, Araki’s work could be seen as having a certain affinity to the work of Hokusai who became well known through his erotic xylographs called "shunga". He also created the extraordinary "images of a fluctuating world" capturing a social reality in all its aspects beyond natural beauty.

"Araki’s photographs – Maggia writes – is always vital and is constantly inside life: it flows within… By this I mean that Araki belongs to the city, he belongs to his ever changing existence". The show which begins with a section dedicated to the sensual and ephemeral beauty of flowers and ends up with numerous sections of mostly black and white photographs. In Tokyo Nostalgy a dense series of photographs captures modern and old parts of Tokyo, streets swarming with people, store windows with food or shoes, people eating or taking the bus, anonymous faces. There are as well indoor scenes with nudes, and shots of random lovers in which the photographer follows into the bedroom, capturing their most intimate effusions. In the 90’s Diarly he presents a freer and often amusing diary of images: for example we see the photographer with friends, or in bed with a girl, or in action on the set while he is shooting women in ropes hanging from the ceiling, or female genitalia decorated with flowers. Araki’s most emblematic work is him photographing a girl: they are both naked in a bathtub.

In the section entitled Araki’s Paradise. Araki’s Lovers one discovers some of his most fantastic colored photos of female nudes. For example, there is one of a group of girls laying down with a toy crocodile who seems to roam around in an aggressive yet playful way. Among the photos on exhibit, there is a beautiful series of cloudy skies, in black and white and the most striking and melancholic series of all is Sentimental Journey (which is also the title of the show). This last series is dedicated to his beloved wife who died very young. There are images of her lying in a coffin full of fresh flowers and here the symbolic meaning of the flowers shown in the first part of the show reveals the emblematic metaphor for beauty, sensuality and the ephemeral dimension of existence. Another part of the comprehensive exhibition (rather inconsistent with the rest of the show) contains a group of photos shot by Arab in Italy. It is mostly portraits of various people mostly workers from Pratt. Finally, there is a series of videos where one sees the photographer at work, shot in different occasions during the last ten years. More than just plain documentations, these pieces reveal the various phases of the process in the making of the photos and they show the joyous vitality and amazing energy that distinguishes the creative expressions of the artist.




Francesco Poli
Translation by Holly Miller