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Howtan
Art in America, May, 2004 by Achille Bonito Oliva
An Interior designer 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 very special moment in Howtan's life, a time of passion on one side and introspection on the other. On the photographic set the artist reconstructs situations in which feelings and emotions are materialized and exteriorized so as to defuse the drama of inner suffering and experience a feeling of pleasure and liberation. It is therefore an act of self-transformation, in a continuous process of evolution and self-discovery.
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ACHILLE BONITO OLIVA "the Art of Tearing" for HOWTAN
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 transferal 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 intentionality 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'etre, 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.
