« I approach something, wherever, and then: a flash of strobe light! Bathed in light, everything becomes a fragment of love. ». Araki
Madame Bovary Bound, or Araki’s Martial Art
From flowers to ropes, Araki’s photographs give off a whiff of almost baroque affliction and enthrallment, which have a potent resonance in the imagination of this amateur of Caravaggio’s painting.
In Araki’s plentiful and polymorphous oeuvre, sexual provocation isn’t always to be found where it may first appear, namely in the photographs of bondage which are his best-known works, almost overwhelmingly so.
One could easily apply the simplest symbolism: a flower has sexual organs; it awaits to be pollinated, fertilized, sometimes by a wayward insect. In the end, however, Araki’s flowers are irreducible to the allure of the female sex, seen up close, barely “metamorphosed.” Of course, the close-up of a white, fleshy orchid, its sepals spread open like thighs around the pistil, are as arousing as Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World, which even Jacques Lacan kept hidden behind a curtain. But doesn’t this aesthetic subterfuge serve to overcome the apprehensiveness we feel about examining the originary delta? The spathe of a calla lily wrapped around the inflorescence like a sheath suggestively evokes the male member. One could thus be tempted to consign Araki’s flowers to the role of elegant transference. The deadly flowers, the crudest image of earthly corruption, raise their rumpled flesh and their faded colors to the transgressive turgescence of the first humans. The compositions with flowers and plastic critters—like the toy Godzilla—are a tongue-in-cheek nod to the viewer, without losing any of their poetry or freshness. Some floral compositions are almost modest, and one could almost call them memorial, so much do they remind a European viewer of the wreaths that used to be kept under glass on the mantle, or yet make us think of those humble offerings placed on the graves of young girls who have departed before their time. Most simply put, these images touch us deeply.
(Extract from texte by Sophie Makariou)
EXHIBITION
Araki
From April 13th to September 5th, 2016
Curators : Jérôme Neutres & Jérôme Ghesquière
Musée national des arts asiatiques Guimet
6, place d’Iéna
75116 Paris
France
http://www.guimet.fr
BOOK
Araki Nobuyoshi
Éditions Gallimard / Musée national des arts asiatiques – Guimet
304 pages, 719 illustrations
39,90 euros
ISBN : 978-2-07-017955-8
