The exhibition Reflexio presents photographic landscapes that AXEL HÜTTE created in southern Germany in 2022. The photographer’s pictures blend analytical precision with subtle emotion. As a student in Bernd and Hilla Becher’s master class at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Art, HÜTTE devised a singular visual language that balances between documentation and abstraction. Interrogating photography’s claim to objectivity, it opens up a space in which perception and recollection interfuse. His works, often in large formats, combine painstaking attention to detail with atmospheric depth.
HÜTTE’s landscapes on view in the new exhibition encompass lakes, ponds, wetlands, and forests filled with a peculiar calm and evocative density. The artist deliberately eschews the temptation of expansiveness of the panorama, with fragmented fields of view, inverted motifs, and multilayered reflections. Using a plate camera, a piece of equipment whose history goes back to the early years of photography, to make razor-sharp pictures, HÜTTE captures complex mirror images and perspectival irritations in reflective water surfaces. The leading Renaissance polymath Leon Battista Alberti described the youth Narcissus, who lay down by a pond and fell in love with his own likeness, as “inventor picturae”: the discoverer of the picture. The motif of the reflection, in the sense of both visual double and mental representation, occupies a central place in the history of figurative art and profoundly informed the idea that classical painters formed of their art. HÜTTE extends this traditional trope to the medium of photography, outlining a process in which nature replicates itself in its form and doubles – but by the same token also transforms and reinterprets – existing reality. This fundamental relation from image to depiction is pivotal in the history of photography. The latter is seen from the outset as a medium defined by its mass reproducibility and its function as an analogue copy of nature. HÜTTE’s process of a double doubling – the photographic reproduction of a mirror image – endows the resulting picture with the dignity of a self-contained whole worthy of depiction. The presentation in large-format prints aligns photography with the tradition of panel painting and emancipates it from its status as a purely technical, documentary medium. Photography appears here less as a mechanical image than as an autonomous work of art, keeping the concern front and center that is HÜTTE’s guiding interest: the complex relationship between immediate likeness and the picture limned by the imagination.
Shrouded in legends, the sceneries of Upper Swabia – including the Blautopf, a spring that inspired the nineteenth-century writer Eduard Mörike to weave mythical tales – serve HÜTTE not only as natural motifs, but also as projection screens for playful compositional experiments. The inversions of the natural tonal values manifest themselves now more distinctly, now more subtly, underscoring the graphical-dynamic element of the water surface. The results are marbled and almost abstract visual fields that unsettle wonted perceptual patterns. The photographs oscillate between radical abstraction and straightforward depiction of nature. The eye is cast adrift amid a vegetative bustle of lines, shapes, and reflections that undercuts conventional representations of landscapes and situates the beholder not in front of but amid a perpetually changing scenery. Forever in flux, these compositions engender pictorial spaces containing worlds in motion that withhold the kind of dependable orientation that is typically associated with representation in the mode of photographic realism. The reflections quiver and vibrate, having been captured, it seems, in the instant of their evanescence. In this manner, HÜTTE’s photographs bear witness, as exacting as it is poetic, to the imperceptible transitions between sweeping undertow and the stillness of reflection, between recollection and reality.
INSTALLATION