Colecciones de arte

Berlin, Neue Nationalgalerie, 2001

DESCRIPTION

In his most recent series Hütte has once again taken up one of his early themes, the urban architecture of major cities. However, on this occasion, after more than twenty years refining a vision specialised in the most varied natural landscapes, he has focused his attention on an aspect that is entirely new to him, night. Night is especially attractive for photography through the light we inevitably find in big cities that have become lit-up jungles, cityscapes quite different from those we dwell in during the day. Once again, London, Berlin, Paris and Tokyo are the focus of his images, yet this time they are not just symbolic places, characteristic parts of the cities as in his early work, but an overall view of the places, something made possible by the night lights, which erase certain contours, eliminating much of the story of the place to rebuild it with bright lights, dark shadows and sparkling colours.

This project on night lights is structured into two parts, the exteriors and the interiors. In the former, Hütte outlines some very special skylines of the different cities, creating markedly geometric compositions, with axis that split the images. In the latter, the series of interiors, the artist works in characteristically cultural places, places of study and intellectual activity: libraries, exhibition venues, centres of purely human activity.

This is the series Berlin, Neue Nationalgalerie belongs to, a piece that is key to the new series in that the colour and light are essential in reinforcing the axis of inward tension. His special way of situating the line of the horizon and the fragility of the physical limits are especially interesting in a piece that focuses on architectural interiors, which he converts into autonomous places lacking exteriors.

While it is true that the human presence is non existent in Axel Hütte's photographs, this is so only at first glance, for the human presence resides in the almost invisible traces it has left in passing before the artist has arrived. This cultural feature is especially present in the way Hütte sees, in the perspective, in the choice of a district, in the fragment of reality that each photograph exemplifies and isolates, as an independent world.

This human presence, which was originally in the portraiture and which gradually diminished in the architecture and cityscapes, and finally disappearing completely in his landscapes, it restored in his recent series of portraits reflected on water, transparencies that join landscape and portrait, nature and individual. Finally, he has returned to cityscapes through his series Nocturnal. Reflections of city lights, of humanity in its massive degree. Sleepy big cities where the lights in buildings, along streets, forever enlighten the presence of man. While in these cityscapes, man's traces are also portrayed, even in evident ways, his real presence, never. R. O.