Born: 1991, Croatia
Profession: Art director
Lives and works in: Čakovec, Croatia
The best portraits evoke in us the feeling of standing face to face with our loved ones. In this sense, the portrait is characterized by a lack, a feeling that almost resembles (but never quite) an encounter with a person we know or love. But what if a portrait could surpass reality and offer an encounter more intimate than the real thing? Intimate is what is closest to us emotionally, precisely because it is also closest to us spatially. Yet even in the tightest embrace, the limitations of the physical world prevent complete union; two bodies cannot occupy the same point in space. The SCAN project rejects this idea. Using a scanner-like technique, Horvatić captures his subjects offering a point of view that the observer literally shares with the subject of the portrait: I’m looking at you from where you are. Collapsing the distance between bodies, the portraits in SCAN fulfill the fantasy of a complete fusion of observer and observed that the cruelty of the physical world makes impossible. On the other hand, taken from below, scan-like photographs take as much as they give because they do not allow the observer to see the part of the body that we most directly associate with identity – the face. If faces are the central point of someone else’s identity, then Horvatić’s faceless bodies make us wonder if we are actually looking at another individual at all. Like Narcissus in Greek mythology, the beholder is mesmerized by what only resembles someone else’s beautiful body. Nevertheless, the unexpected perspective of Horvatić’s photographs overcomes the problems inherent in the Narcissus myth. Because despite the apparent impersonality of scanning technology, a “scanner” is both a device and a person who controls it. With SCAN, Horvatić reveals that the encounter with a portrait always relies on the presence of a third body, the body of the artist. A multitude of bodies standing at the same point in space, alternating. Identity, after all, is sameness. – Roko Rumora