Roberto Kusterle


La Sorgente Luminosa (Shining Fount), 2004
Silver Gelatin Print
16 x 16 inches (40.6 x 40.6 cm)

 

ABOUT ARTIST

Roberto Kusterle mixes fragments of mythology from the history of humanity, combining the most classical and remote myths with contemporary more abnormal bizarre ones. In so doing he brings alive a world of mutation that becomes almost an atlas of transformations. Kusterle seems to reflect about today’s world, where the concepts of birth, life, ageing, and death are changing rapidly, and he knows that the very definition of normality could change, conditioned by models imposed by the genetics industry and communication media. Also for this reason one of the elements of his work is an invitation to reflect on a world that increasingly embraces the biogenetics industry to modify, alter and build its own image. But Roberto Kusterle is a cultured author who appears to adopt a poetic attitude towards the common terror of abnormality; Kusterle’s images invite us to question ourselves about the sense of our existence: what is it that makes us what we are? And above all, if our body really can be destroyed and re-built by technology, what implications does this have on our identity as human beings? One senses a profound knowledge of the history of art in the works, views and frames of Kusterle, and in an arid cultural landscape, scarred continuously by attacks on beauty, his work is immediately distinguishable because it features an aesthetic touch that creates beauty rather than fear. What makes him so interesting is his very use of aesthetics to develop an ethical position on one of the major questions of our times, i.e. the different way of conceiving life and nature under the furious blows of technology, as well as his recourse to the visionary nature of art, always fecund and powerful in producing ‘different’ beings from humans. Kusterle prefers to create an artificial world in which hybrid creatures and human beings live together in perfect aesthetic harmony placing his work between beauty and ideology.