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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).

Silver Miners Digging in the dark with his bare hands the “Silver Miner” will bring a fragment of his world to light.



See the gallery

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THE DANCE OF EVOLUTION

Contemporary biology uses new metaphors to describe the phenomena of life, which is seen as a constantly changing dance of countless elements.
According to Francisco Varela, organisms should be understood as webs of virtual Selves; they are not endowed with a strong identities but rather they are a mosaic, an assortment of different identities: a cellular identity, an immunological identity, a cognitive one, and so on, all of them manifesting in different interactions. The aim of biology today is thus to explore the transition from local interactions to global emerging qualities, in order to understand how all these different Selves merge and separate once again in the dance of evolution. This is what evolution is, a dance of living species intent on exploring the space of their own possibilities.
Uwe Niemann’s wind sculptures, constantly dancing and changing in the wind, are to me the most fantastic aesthetic metaphor of these new perspectives in contemporary biology.
According to physicist and Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine, scientific knowledge offers us a "limited window" onto the Universe. Art is therefore another language with which our species’ mind explores the different dimensions of the Universe. According to Wittgenstein, to imagine a language is to imagine a life form.

Bruno d'Udine

ART HAPPENS WHEN TECHNIQUE TURNS INTO EMOTION

Uwe Niemann’s kinetic sculpture, which Aboca is presenting for the first time in Italy on the occasion of the March 2010 International Lecture on Nature and Human Ecology, clearly shows us how technique can serve to transcend man’s perceptive limit. Ever since Plato’s "cave", we have been questioning our capacity to observe reality as a phenomenon of nature, and how the image of the real is influenced by our ideas, to the extent that one can believe that the idea itself is the only certainty of reality.
In front of a work by Uwe Niemann, our perceptive boundary is lost.
The German sculptor’s "free machine", made of metal equilibriums that defy inertia thanks to their technological precision, can record even the minutest movement of air.
And so the machine becomes organic, it defies any control and becomes pure random and harmonic movement. The mechanical movements’ endless variables open themselves up to the air, in a perfect and anarchic choreography. The machine’s movements reveal the morphology of the air, as though it were doing a Tai Chi form.
Technique thus enters into a perfect synchronization with the air, erasing the boundary between artist’s work and nature.

Gianpietro Carlesso

Silver Miners
Digging in the dark with his bare hands the "Silver Miner" will bring a fragment of his world to light.

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Trilogy of Sound

Communication determines quality.
If we think of contemporary stone sculpture from an exclusively formal and symbolic point of view, it appears – compared to the artistic experiences of the past – as a dead language, archaic and devoid of expressive potential. Yet if we consider matter more carefully, from the point of view of modern science, we discover that our understanding of it is limited by the context in which it is observed, and by us as observers.
It is now well-established that matter, in its infinitesimal intimacy, while being constituted by miniscule and indestructible particles, is really a continuous exchange of information, a field of interactions incorporating an immeasurable energy. By changing our point of view, we realize that all things are interrelated, and in continuous communication and transformation. We can apply this reasoning to other aspects of our system as well, such as the social, economic, and environmental. Our knowledge, our identity, our bodies, our environment are determined by communication. Keeping this awareness alive qualifies our existence.

Gianpietro Carlesso

Resonance, 2007 / Bardiglio marble,
cm. h 85 x 140 x 250