Nobuyoshi Araki is, among the 20th century photographers, the one who has most elevated the atavistic dichotomy between Eros and Thanatos, Love and Death, a narrative topic common to his complex, multiform and articulated artistic production, and not only, considering it as the essence of life and photographic research themselves. This contrast emerges above all by analyzing the themes most dear to him and the way in which they are expressed in his photographs: love, sex, femininity, but also the pain of loss and death, always imbued with nuances and symbolicritualistic representations in which his prolific, almost bulimic, production becomes a mirror of his experiences, of his personal reality. The camera, considered as an extension of the body of the artist, becomes a vital organ through which the artist comes into contact with the world and establishes relationships with people, feels and expresses emotions, lives moments of joy and metabolizes pain and mourning. In this context, a creative action is engendered which is continuous, insistent, energetic, voracious, as evidenced by the immense series of color Polaroids, a dense mosaic of small autonomous and unique works, a multiform visionary universe which concerns Araki's profound feelings towards women, life, death Nude, caught during the explosion of pleasure, posed, immortalized in the street, pursued in private, Araki's "models" possess an iconic, disruptive force whose counterpoint consists in desaturated colors, soft lines, faces furrowed by eyes that are detached from the world and veiled in senselessness. The sexuality which sees them as protagonists is never violent or overbearing, not even in situations of fetishistic and sadomasochistic bondage, perhaps the theme which has most contributed to his international fame. On the contrary, all is wrapped in a symbolic veil of high visual poetry and historical-cultural references with roots in the Japanese tradition of Shiatsu, Shibari (a form of incarceration used by the Samurai since the 15th century) and its late 19th-century erotic derivation, Kinbaku (the art of erotic bondage).
Within this mix of references, Araki portrays bound, hung, gagged women, whose morbid voyeurism leaves room for play, in which the models are conscious participants, and in which the boundaries between good and evil, pleasure and pain, fragility and strength are explored. Araki's art is philosophical-existential pornography, a true artistic expression which, deprived of vice and of Western moralism of religious inspiration, brings out in all its strength the wonderful sense of wonder which captures the human eye when faced with the exhibition of a body. 
At the same time, these very themes, and above all the close link between life and death, are explored in the cycle of work "Flowers". Dahlias, camellias, orchids and flowers of every kind are caught at the moment of maximum splendor, in the vital turgor characteristic of nature just a moment before withering, as if to remind us that pain and suffering are an integral part of life as well as beauty, eros and love.
Araki's photography may seem a mere aesthetic research, but it is not. Indeed, it explores hidden territories, putting irony and analysis of the mystery of existence, erotic desire and playful expression on the same level. The power and strength of his images are embodied by the complex emotional stratification which is elicited from the observer: while his fleshy flowers and extreme bondage scenes can almost disturb the audience because apparently imbued with violence and perversion, in his images there is always a detail, be it a plastic triceratops, a ceramic cat or the fluidly studied look of the model, which captures our gaze allowing us to grasp the innumerable nuances that are the very essence of life.
There are countless publications which gather his visionary universe, as well as many international exhibitions that concern him and the collecting fervor which thrives around his Polaroids, tiny works of art of which Aste Bolaffi is pleased to present a poetic selection which will be put up for auction on November 6, during our annual appointment dedicated to 20th Century Art.