Howtan

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 staticdepending 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.