ROBERTO KUSTERLE and his mutants
THE SECRET MINE OF NEW AESTHETICS
In our time, when humanity is heading toward an exciting and dangerous symbiosis with machines, and we are witnessing the passage from the reproduction to the production of man according to rigorous specifications that prelude a new evolutionary stage based on computing rationality, Roberto Kusterle offers us a striking alternative vision of this transition. The artist's approach is different, in fact opposite: the fusion does not take place with the firm artificiality of jagged mechanical devices or the invisible whirling of intangible bits, but rather with the soft, sinuous and proliferating world of plants, flowers, and seeds. In these works by Kusterle, the feminine beauty is altered, decomposed and then rebuilt, hybridized with materials that are initially foreign but eventually integrate with the human body to produce unusual, chimerical creatures, bordering on the visionary and monstrous. The nakedness of the faces is covered by rich and barbaric decorations: corymbs, clusters, drupes, inflorescences, rhizomes, and the whole luxuriant blooming of the vegetal nature, transform, with the aid of a gray-bronze, rocklike, and timeless coloring, into seemingly metallic jewels, conveying a somber and tepid splendor. Tattooed doodles sometimes branch out from the face and neck, evoking certain statues that capture the process of metamorphosis from woman into vegetable, in a painful and contorted snapshot: Daphne turning into a laurel, as sung by Ovid. One is baffled by how the nudity of the skull is amended by plant-like and flowery helmets extending the length of the heads, that resemble those of the noble caste in ancient Egypt or of certain exotic peoples. Also striking is the fact that the eye is always hidden - closed, walled-in, even blinded - as though seeing and seeing oneself were forbidden. The mouth, ears and nose instead are always on display; the nose in particular is always especially beautiful in its magnificent and splendid appearance. The incorporation of plants or mineral elements, such as the rough and dried residual traces of smeared clay, exalts and transforms the beauty of the face, neck, and shoulders while simultaneously hiding and almost erasing it, transforming it into a masked, scaled, and altered beauty, which is always present like an opaque jewel flowered in the secret mine of a new aesthetics.
Giuseppe O. Longo
ROBERTO KUSTERLE
Roberto Kusterle was born in Gorizia in 1948. As a self-trained artist, he painted and made installations, and in 1988 began working with photography, which became his main expressive medium. His photographic works appear in over twenty publications, and in 2006 he received the prize for best photography exhibition in Slovenia at the Mesec Fotografije, Lubjljana. His most recent solo exhibitions include: "Bellezze di Atlantide", MODE (Treviso 2010); "Senza tempo né luogo", Galleria Weber & Weber (Turin, 2010); "Ana-Kronos", Cankarjev dom (Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2009) and mc2gallery (Milan, 2009); "Una mutazione silente", Wook Lattuada (New York, 2009), Galerija Sodobne Umetnosti (Celje, Slovenia, 2009), and Centro Arti Visive "La Castella" (Motta di Livenza, 2009); "Lo specchio del corpo", Galerija Tir (Solkan, Nova Gorica, Slovenia, 2008); "Lo zoo dell'anima", ArtMbassy (Berlin, Germany, 2008).