In France, we discovered the photographer Mat Hennek through his original portraits of classical musicians. In the last few years, this photographer, formerly known by the pseudonym “Kasskara”, has given a new touch to classical music aesthetics with his portraits that show the souls of the musicians and of the music that passes through their hands. Mat Hennek alternately incorporates the human being into his instrument or the musician into nature, achieving a visual union of the tangible and the subtle.

I could not describe his work in technical terms; I can just bring a writer's eye to the intensity of the emotion he arouses, viewers finding themselves rooted to the spot before the beauty of Mat Hennek's photographs. It is the virtue of stasis, in the sensé of the novelist James Joyce. True art holds the eye and the feelings fixed on the image for its own sake. It is not advertising, it is aesthetics. Suddenly, we are brought to a halt by a photograph that stirs our senses.

On the agenda for 2011, The2Circles exhibition brings together for the first time the Woodlands series with the Alpenpässe: natural landscapes from which humans seem to be absent. As the photographer told the German paper Crescendo: “man has disappeared from my photos this time, to be replaced by nature. I can render the soul and music more visible without man”.

Woodlands gives us genuine portraits of trees. I say “portrait” because Mat Hennek eliminates the borders between painting and photography, revealing the soul of a land scape that is unique, indivisible, part of nature, something that few artists have done, most being tempted to project their own moods onto nature instead of accepting it as it is. Mat Hennek does not just let us see it, he lets us feel it, through his mystical graphic style that turns a landscape into pure abstraction. The vertical lines of the trunks tell us about the resonance of their coverings and their inherent colours.

In Woodlandsand Alpenpässe, Mat Hennek removes spatial landmarks, alternately erasing the ground and the horizon, so we lose our sense of direction. While in Woodlandshe keeps close to the trees, the oppposite is true of Alpenpässe: the mountains are photographed from above, to the extent that they merge visually with the grooves of a pine tree, or reveal a veined piece of bark beneath the snow.

While adopting opposing viewpoints, the photographer cancels out contrasts, underlines the kinship between wood and stone, and by freeing our eyes of appearances, he links us to the Earth. It is impossible not to become absorbed in the membrane of these forests or the jaggedness of these mountains, as if through a blending of souls, not to hear the song of the Navajo Indians resounding: “I walk in Beauty”.

Through Hennek's photographs, we penetrate a series of mysterious circles evoking both the womb of the Earth and the infinite cycle of life. In beauty, there is a powerful spiritual path. Indeed, man is not needed in these works, as it is the viewer who becomes wholly integrated in the bosom of nature.

Laureline Amanieux
Writer
Rome, February 2011

Mat Hennek - Into the woods.