Aspassio Haronitaki’s first works developed the idea of combining human beings and animals. In his large photographs, one can hardly distinguish whether the features, plasticity, and frame of the beings have been appropriated from the human, or from the animal kingdom. These worrying compositions have something in common with totemic images. Even at the time when urban civilization had yet to dominate humanity, man constantly sought out the possibility of possessing qualities such as power and speed – qualities which he did not possess himself, and which he envied the animals that did. These compositions combine human beauty and animal ferocity: they awaken the unconscious in the context of extermination by a developing society, and of the extinction of many kinds of animals.

Not long ago, Haronitaki turned his attention to the plant world and made a series of large photographs, “Moon Flowers” – large-scale compositions with a storm of colorful forms of mysterious plants, names impossible to guess at first glance, spread across them. The lightness of these translucent stems and the permeability of these ethereal flowers leave an impression of immersion into the inner being itself, after which only a few outlines of silhouette and alliteration, stretching to the depths of the soul, are remembered. These new nature-themed compositions open mysterious and hidden sides to the plant world before us. They emerged from complex modern scanners used to modernize medical exercises. The equipment calculates not only the depths of the scanned object itself, but also the movement of air around it, with its little bubbles and droplets, integrating the plant into the composition’s general whole. The presence of the author is felt on different levels: composition, the chosen method of graphic transfer, colors. Yet the artist does not only use the apparatus, its resources and its possibilities, nor is he limited to botanical studies: he is harmoniously experimenting with the introduction of external elements like flowerpots, seashells, pastries. And it is no surprise that a napoleon cake was used for a similar immersion deep into the subject. These compositions, dedicated to nature as if having come out of a dream, became for the author a metaphor of our inner world, with all its richness of emotion and feeling. It had seemed as if the theme of exploiting nature’s beauty had already been exhausted. And here we notice a new technology allowing for the transfer of a vision that presents us with the contradiction of plant dematerialization and for the exposure of the structure containing their essence. Such paradoxically characterizes the works, which raise questions of interaction between man and nature.

— Jean Hubert Martin, excerpt from the 3rd Moscow Biennale, “Against Exclusion”.