| Roberto Kusterle is an enigmatic and fascinating figure. He combines fragments of classical mythology from the history of humanity with contemporary, more abnormal, bizarre ones. In doing so he brings alive a world of mutation that becomes an atlas of transformations. |  |
Francesca Alfano Miglietti
Roberto Kusterle is an enigmatic and fascinating figure. He combines fragments of classical mythology from the history of humanity with contemporary, more abnormal, bizarre ones. In doing so he brings alive a world of mutation that becomes an atlas of transformations. Kusterle reflects on today’s world, where the concepts of birth, life, aging, and death are changing rapidly, and where the very definition of normality could change, conditioned by models imposed by the genetics industry and communication media. His work is an invitation to reflect on this world, which 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 our sense of existence. What is it that makes us what we are? 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 art history in Kusterle’s work. In an arid cultural landscape continuously scarred 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—the different ways 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.
Human bodies, plants, flowers, animals, and earth—the result is a still life that bubbles with vitality, where the goddesses and gods of beauty in our time are presented as anxious icons, with eyes shut, their backs to us, or in positions that hide their eyes. The rapport between the human body and the vegetal world implies other meanings including beauty, sex, spirituality, and death. Kusterle’s approach to the image results from the perfect balance between reality and imagination. This is why the human body is the leitmotif of his photographs, interpreted in a double sense by combinations of pulsating organs and entities associated in support of others who take part in its survival. All his pictures produce two prospects that seem to freeze vitality in an exemplary, definite shape so the image becomes a reflection on the paradoxical desire for immortality that smoulders under art and is essential in all its manifestations.
