Taking on a look capable of referring the sensitivity and attention of a visual and narrative tradition such as that expressed in the context of Japanese eroticism, with Sakura Lust, Casper Kent presents a collection of images with a strong erotic impact, images that the author has made over the course of a year, setting his story in several Japanese ryokans and old-fashioned love hotels.
Places, those crossed by Casper Kent, capable precisely by virtue of their transience, to report an atmosphere of escapism, ethereal, in which guests can isolate themselves and escape the outside world to find or reconstruct, starting from the environment, a more intimate reality in which the shades and the timing of things are different.
Approaching the subject with attention and sensitivity, showing with it a tangible confidence through the same images or “moments” collected, in his photographic work Kent realizes a parallelism between the plastic articulation of the scene and the body and the hanami.
The hanami (花 見 ) literally “look at the flowers”, is a Japanese term that refers to the traditional custom of enjoying the beauty of the spring flowering of trees. A practice and a posture that therefore expresses in this parallelism made by the author the will and the desire to find, in the amazement of the things of the world and in the possibility to fully enjoy transitory moments, the possibility of a visual and photographic approach that rewards the ephemeral, what is encountered.
An approach to work that finds its central moment in living itself and in the experience of the things and flesh of the other, letting the images be nothing but the expression that emerges naturally following this crossing and encounter.
By outlining a delicate territory, full of moments collected and suspended, treating each image as a precious step towards an understanding of the subject and the environment that are formulated starting from its own sincere observation and careful experience, Sakura Lust is a work for which the refusal of a fast and spectacular approach to images becomes the form and rhythm of another path, a poetic and enchanted way of moving through things, capable of restoring all the familiarity of an intimacy with the world, people, desire, bodies and the time that we find ourselves denying more and more often.
With Sakura Lust, Casper Kent accompanies us in the story of a meeting, a simple work capable, nevertheless, of reporting, thanks to the intensity and intimacy of the images, all the mystery and breadth of an experience that is, first of all, human.
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