himself, and which he envied the animals
that did. These compositions combine human
beauty and animal ferocity: they awaken the
unconscious in the context of extermination by
a developing society, and of the extinction of
many kinds of animals.
Not long ago, Haronitaki turned his attention
to the plant world and made a series of large
photographs, ‘Moon Flowers’ – large-scale
compositions with a storm of colorful forms
of mysterious plants, names impossible to
guess at first glance, spread across them. The
lightness of these translucent stems and the
permeability of these ethereal flowers leave
an impression of immersion into the inner
being itself, after which only a few outlines
of silhouette and alliteration, stretching to the
depths of the soul, are remembered.
These new nature-themed compositions open
mysterious and hidden sides to the plant
world before us. They emerged from complex
modern scanners used to modernize medical
exercises. The equipment calculates not only
the depths of the scanned object itself, but
also the movement of air around it, with its
little bubbles and droplets, integrating the
plant into the composition’s general whole.
The presence of the author is felt on different
levels: composition, the chosen method of
graphic transfer, colors. Yet the artist does
not only use the apparatus, its resources and
its possibilities, nor is he limited to botanical
studies: he is harmoniously experimenting
with the introduction of external elements like
flowerpots, seashells, pastries. And it is no
surprise that a napoleon cake was used for a
similar immersion deep into the subject.
These compositions, dedicated to nature as if
having come out of a dream, became for the
author a metaphor of our inner world, with
all its richness of emotion and feeling. It had
seemed as if the theme of exploiting nature’s
beauty had already been exhausted. And here
we notice a new technology allowing for the
transfer of a vision that presents us with the
contradiction of plant dematerialization and
for the exposure of the structure containing
their essence. Such paradoxically characterizes
the works, which raise questions of interaction
between man and nature.
Jean Hubert Martin, former director of Centre
Pompidou Paris, Kunstpalast Düsseldorf
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