Book Review: Dino Kužnik
Untitled © Dino Kužnik
Written by Demetra Nikolakakis
When going about our day-to-day lives, it’s easy to overlook the beauty surrounding us. Routine turns to boredom. The very things we might have considered breathtaking become symbols of mundanity. Exploring the aesthetics of familiar spaces, Dino Kužnik’s latest book, • • 5 Dino Kužnik, is a collaboration between Setanta Publishing and Open Doors Gallery, consisting of photographs that find renewed beauty in everyday objects.
Untitled © Dino Kužnik
Untitled © Dino Kužnik
While flipping through Kužnik’s book, readers are presented with a categorical dilemma. Early photographs in the book can easily be sorted into two categories: photos of the mundane, and of the surreal. There is little overlap. Photos of the mundane feature a car parked in a driveway, or a motel sign in a suburban community, showing obvious signs of wear, while photos of the surreal are incredibly striking: a giant red grid emerging from purple fog or a transmission tower in a lake, the water and hazy sky blending together. But as the book progresses, the distinction between the mundane and the surreal becomes blurred, as surrealist elements begin to permeate objects and locations from everyday life.
Untitled © Dino Kužnik
For many residents of big cities or their metropolitan areas, factories or tires on the side of the road are far from uncommon. They are passed by on a morning commute, or on trips out of the city; they are unremarkable. Nonetheless, these objects are the subject of one of Kužnik’s most striking photographs. Factory chimneys contrast a blue sky, smoke billowing into the air. Below lie a series of rectangles – first the hedges, then a wall, the sidewalk, and the lanes of the road – shapes so geometric that we might not expect to see them in our daily lives. The round edges of a tire at the side of the road finally break the image’s linearity, a significant role for a discarded, mundane object. Although the photograph features an everyday scene, the geometric nature of the piece gives an incredibly surreal impression, each region of the image blocked off like a Mondrian painting.
Untitled © Dino Kužnik
In another image, a motel exterior seems to be split in half, a peachy beige wall on the left side, washed-out blue on the right. The walls, floors, and railings all create strong lines — the brown center wall resembling a tree trunk, the railing spreading out like its branches. On the pavement, directly in front of the wall, lies a shrub, its three branches growing at angles, split in half where the wall changes colors. The photograph is roughly symmetrical, the division between colors resembling a mirror. Yet the image was taken at a regular motel — any other angle would have resulted in an ordinary, everyday view of a plant in a motel parking lot, rather than a surrealist photograph. Kužnik’s unique ability to unearth the surreal in mundanity begs the question: where else may surrealism be hiding in our daily lives?
Kužnik’s book is available on Setanta Books’ website.
