A zen poetics of sexuality composed by the gaze of a playful monk, calmly obsessed with the form of the male and female sex, mindfully seeking images of intercourse. But though it is a series about sexuality, no persons are to see, only objects are present. Among them zen preferences: garments, flowers, seeds, trees, tiny daily objects. And most of them resist any attempt to make a projection of personal or psychological identity. This also manifests in the sculptural form we encounter in the majority of images, if not compositions, and one of the many charms of this edit is that we often don’t know whether what we have in front of us was a random shot or a careful arrangement. The overall discourse on sexuality is usually ‘wet’ but here the images have a zen ‘dryness’, even the ‘wet’ ones. Sexuality is intense, even fierce, but everything here seems to lands in calmness. However, this calmness is sometimes ready to explode – see the black and white images that play with the iconography of the fetish. But still, these do not distort the serene atmosphere but rather enhance it through a rhythmical interplay. Sexuality is rather linked to the sublime, but here the movement is distinctly towards the beautiful in order to convey a powerful intimacy under the pretext of detachment– if that’s not zen what is it then?

- by Manos Perrakis