Nobuyoshi Araki at Blum & Poe - Los Angeles, California - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

For viewers who think of Nobuyoshi Araki as the Japanese Helmut Newton, a photographer of soft-core geisha bondage tableaux and the Tokyo after-hours sight this exhibition came as a small surprise. Seventeen black-and-white photographs from the 1991 series "From shut up Range," shown for the first time in America, neared Araki as a practitioner of symbolist still life. Taken upon or from the balcony of the artist's Tokyo apartment, the photographs were conceived in answer to the death of Araki's wife and sometime collaborator, Yoko

Elegiac motifs predominated. Wilted flowers, weathered surfaces, the desiccated corpses of garden lizards -- although heavily styl by the agency of the artist's self-consciously decadent sensibility, these pictorial ultimate parts all refer to traditional memento mori. While we recognize them as cliches, they continue to bring into operation the emotional force we perceive when confronted with the irrevocable.

Araki uses compositional devices to heighten this poignancy. by dint of focusing on objects divided in half (an array of freshly make an incision in apples laid out on a rusting table top is especially haunting) or upon objects observed in pairs on the contrary framed so as to emphasize their separate identities, he invests his subdues with a loose-fit anthropomorphism. The contrasting on the contrary complementary shapes of an anthurium and a bird of paradise -- flowers of decidedly bisexual appearance -- thus be subservient to the same semantic purpose as do a two of shoes, worn and mismatched, in another image. by dint of its somewhat arch reference to van Gogh's famous painting of a pair of gains the latter picture also hints at a stage of irony; after all, Araki is an artist who carefully navigates the vernacular while avoiding kitsch.

Still, there is bathos in like self-regard, no matter how closely calibrated, and it was exacerbated here by means of the way these unframed, medium-sized photographs (ca. 41 by means of 25 inches) were installed -- pinned by dint of their curling edges to the wall in a straight line around the gallery. similar studied informality was jarringly at unevens with the ostensible subject matter of these photos. Nor are the prints themselves especially beneficial so that the viewer is denied the esthetic pleasures customarily proffered by "pure" photography of this meditative sort.

As it happens, the photographs in this present to view were originally reproduced -- at higher print quality and with many others from the same series -- in work form, a much better format for work in like manner dependent on the viewer's emotional receptiveness. Unfortunately, the exhibition appear to beed arbitrarily chosen, and the sparse installation gave no hint that Araki is celebrated in Japan and Europe partly for the prodigious convolution of work he shows, frequently in rather ad hoc situations. This puzzling present to view offered a new and not true interesting look at a photographer who, to justice from his reputation abroad, is capable of better.

COPYRIGHT 1997 Brant Publications, Inc.

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