Something quietly emerges at every moment throughout these images: ghosts halfway between sex and death; fragments of seduction that wander in-between lost worlds.
Sexuality is something transparent, smoky and elusive under our fingertips. But how does one define sexuality in a place where the body is everything \u2013 not only material but also consumable? And here sexuality becomes all but ghostly, the way it has always been in Japanese tales: from another world, but yet somwhere here near us. These images supercede the passage of time, reaching beyond notions specific to any particular time or era.
The interesting thing in the creative process \u2014 in the artistic process \u2014 resides in the reaffirmation of the artist\u2019s individuality. This is increasingly difficult in a world dominated by advertising, publicity and marketing. It is progressively more rare to see true creativity in an artist\u2019s work. Everything is business; nothing is personal. In Kitamura\u2019s images, on the contrary, it\u2019s all personal, lived and felt. Everything is personal. This constitutes an important departure from what we typically see today, where the photographic image is becoming technically more distant from what was photographed.
In art, what counts is the soul and not the theme. In Kitamura\u2019s works the themes are diluted and mixed. Here we do not get stuck anywhere, nor to a specific moment in time; we move on to another phase. A phase that brings us to another space, another world, a limbo.
Here, what appear as skin, fingers, breasts, sexes, and clothes are tranformed into masks, gifts, lights and Bahia sweat by this young Japanese artist who one day came to Salvador.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Miguel Rio Branco<\/p>\n\n\n