ABOUT THE SERIES

In his latest series, Andrej Lamut delves into psychologically charged content. The title of the series, Persona, refers to a concept from the psychology of Carl Gustav Jung. Persona (Latin for mask) is a part of human personality which the individual manifests in society. It is a means of social survival and necessary for communicating with the external world, allowing individuals to play different roles and adapt to social demands. At the same time, Jung warns that the persona can dominate the ego, the conscious Self, or disintegrate, leading to internal chaos.
In the Persona series, Andrej Lamut skilfully navigates the realm of metaphors for the human body and nature, symbolically reflecting the human psyche and calling for a return to authenticity. The human figure is depicted as a shadow, a reflection, a distortion, and a dispersed body. The intangibility of the body can be understood as a metaphor for the Self, which resides beneath the image that a person presents to the world.
The author presents the multifaceted, contradictory nature of the Self through contrasting interpretations, where the inner world acts as terra incognita. This combines, on the one hand, the fear of the unknown, and on the other, the desire to explore the unknown, as it may contain the marvelous thing. Lamut takes the viewer’s gaze through dark passages, the night shore, rocks from which disfigured anthropomorphic figures emerge – as if we are gazing at stations of man’s internal labyrinth, when the Self, exhausted by the weight of societal masks, finds itself in exile, at a crossroads, in a cul-de-sac, revealing its dark side, but also the poetic and even innocent aspects.
– Andreja Rakovec