Robert Hutinski: In the shadows of young girls in the flowers

Robert Hutinski is one of the deepest and most progressive contemporary Slovenian photographers, well known by his sublime aesthetic approach towards eternal questions of life, space and time. He is one of the rare photographers-thinkers who can reach beyond the hollowness of trumpery, and reach the deepest threads of the meaning-sense, this ultimate cradle of existence.

On the first glance the series entitled: In the shadows of young girls in the flowers, is a bit unusual for Hutinski’s previous work, since it is not recognizably dusky, but rather colorful and tender. The colorfulness of the series could be understood as a declination in Hutinski’s photographic expression, but, according to his great talent and artistic sensitivity, he doesn’t use it, as one could expect, to blind the spectator, but rather to create inherent narrative and aesthetic tension which offers deep emotional and intellectual experience. In contrast to the production of the most contemporary images which try to steal attention of the spectators with shallow, straightforward, mostly artificial beauty, Hutinski uses the prettiness to encourage the emotional journey which forces the spectator to think and re-think basic determinations of identity, personality, longing, enjoyment, phantasm, wish, love, solipsism, and relationship.

Echoing the novel of Marcel Proust Hutinski’s series of photos offers rich aesthetic and intellectual insight into the world of self, enjoying the beautifulness of his own phantasms and at same time longing for the touch of otherness. Solipsistic world of phantasy – ontogenesis for any kind of wish which is necessary for the existence of plurality and objective world – is presented as safe dwelling of ego. Nevertheless ego cannot hold out the prison’s chains of his own phantasms, although being divinely beautiful. The need to experience and challenge the reality of solipsistic ideas is stronger and this is the moment when individuality meets plurality. In the limits of individual solipsism love is expected to be fulfilling relationship, but in reality it happens to be a dangerous, painful clash of phantasms, which produce so well-known feeling of self-effacement. In love each ego recognizes the dangerous of being annihilated by Other and this surrounds all of the primarily divine phantasms about love – we must not forget that love firstly appears as autoerotism so mainly as love towards self – with feeling of anxiety. This tension split the safe solipsism of personality into two parts: the individuality and idiosyncrasy of enjoyjment and plurality and dialog of interpersonal wishes. With other words it splits the life into being for the self and being for the others.

This great series of photos shows us that every one of us is inherently divided. Our world consists of: safe life of solipsistic, autoerotic enjoyment of phantasms and adventurous life of being in, with and for others.