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Daniele Buetti
The reflexion, the image is me, but I am not the reflexion
09-04-2010 08-05-2010
Daniele Buetti starts out with female beauty, with the media’s ideal of an archetype (woman) presupposing personal attitudes and collective recognisability. The artist never departs from what the western eye expects to see as soon as femininity is in the focus of the lens. Buetti offers us all the images we want and expect, weaving the present structure of society in the form of provocative, desirable bodies. The glossy magazine paper incarnates the channel he has naturally appropriated, an inexhaustible tank that is continually refilled by photographic parthenogenesis. His women remind us of pages we have already seen, other faces dig up fragments in the well of our memory, generally triggering ocular accelerations which act on the emotional level. We know them even when we do not know them: and this happens because this iconography is now cellular, it congenitally belongs to us, like a particle of an induced memory. Our senses are all triggered as soon as the icon appears: the definitive sign of a “spirit of the times” from which we cannot escape; a signal that our ethical conscience requires a “spirit beyond our times”, a moral limbo that privileges sublime erotic abstractions without the acidic pollution of the media system.
But if Buetti had stopped with the images, he would have been running in low gear, capturing the value of desire but not short-circuiting it, not going beyond the code. Instead, the metabolic process pierces the image and goes beyond it, towards the result of a recognisable, personal imagery. The repeated piercing borders complete sentences like the clouds in classic comic books. His women speak, they express thoughts which dispel the superficiality of their stances as geographies of desire. The phrase breaks with the directional code of fetishism, soils the gloss with marks in an intimate tone with an antagonistic aesthetic. The artist plays with the codes of glamour, and he does so not only with images but with the type of lettering, the acidic colours and the contrasts of dramatic lighting. He adds the fascinating power of the light-box, capable of making the piercings a brilliant post-glamour decoration, a rain of filmic light recalling the fabrics of fashion, the random phrases we see today on T-shirts, bags and other accessories in the urban wardrobe. Buetti’s conceptual clarity lies precisely in the semantic ambiguity of his visual grammar, in the hidden rivulets of all appearances, in the uneven dialogues that each pairing evokes. Nothing is ever what it seems: we can say this without hesitation before the Swiss artist’s army of women.
Beauty and desire as the ultimate reflection on the human condition. The departure and arrival terminals are the body and sexuality, the two poles that drive the engine of social organisation. Psychic and analytic consequences arise around the surfaces of female beauty, those which Buetti calls up by recovering existing images and physically manipulating them. In a play of evocative images, his written text is transformed into a revelation of content, a cathartic detonator that explodes the memories and the present of woman.
The cosmic space of beauty opens up before us… Gianluca Marziani
Press release (pdf)