ROBERTO KUSTERLE
"Between Myth and Fantasy"
Digital C-prints
40 x 40 inches (101.6 x 101.6 cm)
2004

The questions addressed by Roberto Kusterle in his staged photographs are marked in many ways, in their anthropological dimensions of time and spirit, and in their histories and forms. They can only be measured through the imagination of dissociated reality and by oneiric journeying into indefinite distances that evoke feelings of unease, ambiguity, morbidity, and grotesqueness, of a paramythology of man, his coexistence with nature, with the beast. A Boschesque medieval spirit, an Arcimboldoesque mannerism, compositions of the surrealist repertoire (but different from Max Ernst's modernist playfulness and poetic enchantment), the existential alienation of the individual-all these are precisely and consistently defined and rendered in the gray of black-and-white compositional frames, in jigsaw puzzles that allow the coexistence of various intertwining narratives and their main figurative antagonists with diminished, symbolic animate or inanimate objects. There are no visible inaccuracies or forced collages; Kusterle is not only a master of the epic narrative, but also of the idea and its development- without the tekhne there would be no narrative anakhronos.

Kusterle's vision is determined by a dark poetics with marked narrative components. The medium of photography is necessary for the freeze-framing of the drama taking place, without foretelling its denouement. The above-mentioned protagonists are enigmatic human beings, hidden behind animal, fishlike masks, infernal winged metaphors, fairytale dwarf phantasms, Sisyphean helpless colossi shouldering or hauling preternaturally large and heavy burdens. All of Kusterle's dramas progress like directed film sequences; as though expecting to be joined together in some particular order. The angle of Kusterle's camera is wide open to the visionary frame of the physical and spiritual helplessness in the face of man's fatal cataclysm.

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