06.12.2012 – 11.1.2013

Roberto Kusterle is a Slovenian-Italian artist, who dealt with painting and installations until mid 80’s, then it started becoming more and more devoted to photography. Here he preserves a kind of picturesque style, which always contains elements of odd, bizarre, surrealist. His photography does not document, but is a complete invention; objects, people and worlds Kusterle shows come from his imagination and not from reality, which usually serves as the basis for photography. Kusterle creates miz-an-scenes both in the studio and outside, where he first investigates and determines the locations for the recording. He’s using the “installation – design” process to create his own reality, which is “cut” in desired compositions, and further processed in the darkroom or ultimately on the computer.

His photographs have been published in more than twenty publications, including six independent monographs. The exhibition in Photonu was released following an independent publication, which was issued in cooperation with the Italian publishers.

(D.S.)

It has been said and written already that Roberto Kusterle is not only a photographer, but we should repeat it once again while presenting his new work, in perfect harmony with his very personal and peculiar style. It requires the meticulous observation of nature and the establishment of a dialogue with its elements and in this particular case, stone. Simple and humble stones that with patience and curiosity he looks for, chooses, picks and photograph, appreciating its shape, surface, texture, design and color. He appropriates all these esthetic and perceptive values using them to serve his stardust creativity, transferring them on nude bodies and on his models’ skins, adapting to the materials they are wearing, to form a single entity. Thus, surrealistic and surprising embraces upraises between men and element, smooth and rough, hot and cold, living and dead, small and big, light and heavy, always thought and resolved with a calibrated balance and a modern elegance.
Sometimes, the sensation is made of osmose and complicity, others of contrast and hostility, almost hard. In other cases, the figure reflects and prolongates itself into the element, melting to be part of it and at times multiplying into stamps and bodies, refusing to be understood easily, imprisoning, wrapping into themselves, thus hiding faces and gazes. And when the face is also revealed, the eyes are always closed as there is no volition to communicate with the external world, but rather the need to focus on one floating and intimate thought, which the author defines “anakronos”, i.e. without time. The same space in which Kusterle’s “staged photography” leads us is precisely a “mise en scène”, a black, dark or petrified space, without any orientational landmark, in order for the visual tension on the subjects to be maximum, on the pathos they emanate, on the delicate chrome sometimes added to the shapes, never unmotivated and always whispered with discretion.
As in his previous work, the author plays on the ambiguity of photography, nowadays empowered by the use of digital post-production technics to which he got close during the last few years, completing his precious and almost magic camera obscura’s abilities. This has to be understood as a natural and vital requirement of a creative artist who demonstrates he is capable of adapting with its time, learning its language and using it for his purpose. Doubt sidles and subsists even more than before : What is real and what is fake, or better, “artefact”? Ambiguity forces us to walk on a string, hanging in the balance between doubt and certainty, between imagination and representation, but we are more than happy to do so because it is precisely this “mélange” between realism and visionarism that represents, deeply, the secret of his silent and mysterious art.

(Guido Cecere)