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Artist Statement:
Howtan, an Architect with an
eclectic personality, today he
focusses with an incisive
expressiveness his talent and
passion, commitment and
creativity through the
camera’s lens.
The artist, of Italian-Persian
origin, is starting to make
his mark in the international
world of art with works that
certainly do not pass
unnoticed but capture both the
gaze and the soul of those who
stop to observe them.
All his works are open to
multiple meanings and rich in
specific messages.
Each work is deliberately
presented untitled so as to
leave its interpretation open
to the personal reflection of
each viewer, who is thus
called upon to give a voice to
each individual creation..
His innovative artistic
concept is based on a dynamic
vision, rendered by means of a
three-dimensional effect
produced by the insertion of
crystals applied to the
photos, which are thus made
precious with an extra touch
of personality, a unique sign
of recognition.
This collection of works is
named “Hell and Paradise”,
because in conceptual terms it
can be referred to the dualism
of two opposite and
complementary worlds, a
dualism present in the spirit
and personality of the artist
himself.
“Hell and Paradise” marks a
...
Further Information
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Artist Exhibitions:
04 FEB. 2004 - 30 APRIL 2004
GALLERIA CONTARTE
(WWW.CONTARTE.COM)
ROME - ITALY
25 MAY 2004 - 30 MAY 2004
MOSCOW ART FAIR
MOSCOW -RUSSIA
16 SEPT. 2004- 30 OCT. 2004
STELLA ART GALLERY
(WWW.STELLAARTGALLERY.COM)
MOSCOW - RUSSIA
06 JAN. 2005 - 30 JAN. 2005
Light On Hell&Paradise
(Large-Scale ...
Further Information
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Collections:
Coming Soon!
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Commissions:
Coming Soon!
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Reviews for Howtan Howtan:
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HOWTAN
The Art of Tearing
Presentation by
Achille Bonito Oliva
Photography is, by definition, the practice of tearing, tearing off a strip of reality’s skin, an intentional reduction of the three-dimensional world of the real into the two-dimensional world of the photograph. But this subtraction is not a loss of depth, it can instead result in an expansion of the conceptual and mental intensity of the work of art..
Such tearing can thus act as a reflective amplification of the image of art through the photographic image. The camera becomes the means of transferral from one language to another, the progressive shift from a sensitive state of the matter of art to that of a dazzling superficialism that affirms and halts the inherent processuality of many recent works of art.
But for this to occur, it is necessary for the photographic eye to be able to record intensity, the determinant quality of art which is also the foundation of its value. Because there exists an intelligence of the work, an evidence made manifest, internal to the artist’s image, which must be revealed, conveyed and transferred into the visual field of the photograph. The iintentionality of art is the ability of the work to speak its own meaning, embodied in the various materials it dons as its disguises. For this reason, photography cannot employ a static and neutral eye, but must instead besiege the work to convey its internal raison d’être, so as to bring to the glossy surface of the two-dimensional image what is lurking and fermenting inside the tissues of the fabric of art.
Photography, as compared to the traditional arts of painting and sculpture, has always adopted a frontal point of view, a stationary stand from which it confronted the art of the easel. The art produced in the last few years, however, does not allow the visual vicissitudes of the photographer to stay at a standstill, but presses him into an active and penetrating mobility. Howtan employs this dynamic approach to grasp the internal dynamics of works linked to the value of an open and ceaseless processuality, the living time of the body.
To the formalization of a world frozen in its production functions, art replies with the sense of a fluidity that unfreezes the materials from their initial position, to insert them in the dynamic fabric of the work, effected at the cross-point of many references to cinema, advertising, the performative set of the theatre of cruelty, furnished from time to time with small crystals.
From Body Art to Viennese actionism, from cartoons to pornography, from fashion to erotic films, from sado-masochism to voyeurism Howtan, with inspired kleptomania, recaptures linguistic stimula from a family of artists who are not linked to each other by bonds of kinship: Artaud, Kubric, Serrano, Golden, Araki, Abramovich, La Chapelle, Kern. Howtan is thus able to take his stand before the new situation with a focus that fosters the work and mentality of his times, and to transfer to the photographic image the temporaliy that governs art, the excellent movement that aggregates and simultaneously disarranges the various components of the work.
Photography thus becomes a dynamic mirror that can somehow make a move towards life. In fact Howtan’s work goes right in, penetrating the temporal and spatial interstices of the scene produced and documenting its transitions. The result is always an image intent on conveying also the ethical nature of art as doing, a new form of the way artists take their stand towards creation. This explains the photographer’s interest in physical position even in its operative moments, in the manner of facing the work in its formation, growth and development. But the perspective is never psychological, always reaching out instead towards the possibility of expanding the meaning of the work by attempting to photograph the process, the artist at work, captured in the very moment of his manual and concrete endeavour.
Because Howtan’s art founds in processuality and rapidity of aggregation the value of use of materials natural or artificial, solid or impalpable, but always able to evoke a sensorial response and to produce it. Each work requires many takes, many shifts in range and mental sensitivity.
Howtan has produced sequences of images that present themselves as a visual perusal of the body, in the intent not only to faithfully report its sense of life, but also to grasp its sense of form. Indeed his photography never immobilizes the work in a standardized perspective but instead employs a gaze that is nomadic and dynamic or slowed and static depending on the internal rhythm and different connotation given by the artist to his esthetic situation.
This demonstrates that the art of recent years never gives preference to a single point of view as it never gives preference to a creativity closed in a single obsession or poetic mode. The disparity of materials, the diversity of its places of production show how it aims to stimulate and intensify moments of reality that lie horizontally around the operativity of art: rather than on the outer skin of things, it want to act on the biological substance underlying them.
To keep the work of art open to the flows of temporality means attempting to recreate a lost totality. It means reuniting the fracture that marks off and separates the world from art. The processuality internal to the esthetic experience finds in the works of this and other artists its affirmation and concretization. Physical and mental energies are released by works that refuse the closed condensation of a static form. They seek an outlet in the dynamics of processes that activate visible and invisible forces, fluids and subterranean magnetisms.
The majority of these works also tend towards the physical occupation of space, breaking the bonds of the picture-frame to enter into a direct and immediate contact with phenomenal reality. When kept within a frame, it is there solely to increase the mental concentration of the work, through introjection into the esthetic field of the material and mental, biological and cultural existing outside art. To produce art entails provoking magnetic waves above and below its system.
Howtan’s art has gone through many trials, also in relation to phenomena linked and pertaining to identity, participating in the development of a different and alternative mentality. His relationship with nature and culture have found in photographic work the possibility of articulated deployment following new ways of thinking, seeing and feeling. The desire for destructuration which presides over its transformations is clearly present in the most recent works.
As always, art steps over the present and rides the future. The microcosm of the work of art refers to the macrocosm of the world and seeks to found a place of intense totality, whee it is possible to connect physical, mental and social forces in the processual unity of art. Art. in any case keeps relations open and in movement, mobile as the world itself; the bodies are assembled but not welded into a too-close nexus. This freedom also entails an operative dynamic, a fluidity that Howtan has managed to capture in his photographs. The fixity of the image still retains the memory of a mobility typical of the art in question and also of the socially conflictual climate of these last few years.
Because art, being movement par excellence, never stops, always ready to leap forwards, no less than to step back to take what it needs. Now the experimental approach of recent years is witnessing the presence a different mentality, more linked to the intense emotions of individuality and of a photography that finds and founds its value within its own processes.
The sensitivity of art now tends to place the work of art once more outside the confines of any international form of homologation in favour of an individual, not collective quest. However, Howtan’s photography strongly posits its centrality in relation to a confining reality, ready to extend its influence and at the same time to focus on its own intensity.
Photography these days has already crossed the river, it can no longer be considered a minor dialect of art. The mechanical and objective eye of the camera has no automatic mechanism that obliges it to a single perspective, it is instead open to many stimuli and memories that now allow it a ready range of shifts and changes.
Nonetheless, the fact remains that photography always tends to subtract a portion of reality from its wider overall relationships and consign it to the finality of the momentary and instantaneous. Howtan’s photography makes a kind of tear in things, a reduction of surfaces through which can emerge persistencies and residues of depth. The photographer’s eye draws upon a constant practice, which is that of the seige, a circular gaze from which he then proceeds to strike deeply, vivisecting the panoramic generality, and extrapolates the particular.
Speed and freezing into fixity are the poles between which photography moves. Its speed is dictated by the need to pass in review the overall visual field, over which the photographer sweeps his predatory eye. Its freezing is the outcome of the choice and preference, announced by the framing of the shot, which thus estabishes the edge of the view, the boundary that separates and sets off the detail.
In this sense, photography is a linguistic exercise, as it obscures the portions not brought into focus by the lens and left outside the image, and the consequent dazzlement of the privileged detail. Remembering and forgetting are the oscillating movements, the pendulum range along which the photographer’s gaze runs and slides, because he cannot help taking into account what is left outside the margins of the image. Howtan has always worked within the specifics of photography, managing to calibrate his physiological eye in harmony with the objective eye of the camera’s lens, swinging in perfect balance between the ability to recognize the real and the ability to excede it through a sensitive skill, that of bringing the datum to the status of a sign of an abstractive language in relation to the reality photographed.
He has understood that the language of the photographic image does not differ from that of other arts, that art in general is alway a dazzling exercise of incessant ambiguity, that the language of art never speaks directly and frontally of the world but always conjugates it obliquely and transversally. In brief, Howtan has understood that photography too, which traditionally appeared to place itself frontally in relation to its objects as pure recording, instead possesses an oblique and sidelong glance that looks at things and reflects them changed in valence, transported into an elsewhere.
He thus avoids the risks of a naturalism sited in the mechanical mimeticism that had seemed to pervade photography as such. Instead Howtan has shown that the apparatus that records things, the one-eyed chamber of the camera, passing through the processes of cutting, framing and colour, constitutes not so much a parallel language as an alphabet, which speaks a language other than that of the common dialect of the everyday.
A language which of course is not lacking in memory, reference to the reality that was its starting-point, but has the virtue of transporting it into the dazzlingly evident instantaneousness of an alphabet that speaks itself first and foremost and moves following its own inner rules. The rules of Howtan’s language are extremely flexible, and tend to move along a double tangent, that of analysis of the datum and that of its synthetic transfiguration. An analysis which entails an approach to the reality to be photographed in all its relationships and objective complexities.
It is only by taking the complex as the starting-point that it is possible to end up with the simple, viewed as a detail extrapolated from its initial connections. Howtan has understood that photography works in the direction of the “ready-
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