BERLIN.- According to Nietzsche’s conception the human being is „the animal which is not yet detected“. Only through the reversion of this primate, which has always been associated with rationality, opposite the body he could transform into a successful, agile creature. Over the years artists, littérateurs and philosophers pointed their interest towards the quaint confrontation of the human being and the animal: from Aristotle to Bruno, Voltaire to Kant, Ovid to Kafka, from Bosch’s disturbing visionary worlds to Matthew Barney’s metamorphoses.

The Project “The Zoo of the Soul” (der Zoo der Seele) seems like a continuation in this search. It confronts the photographs of the Italian artist Roberto Kusterle and the sculptures of the German artist Susan Donath.

The works of the photographer Roberto Kusterle, born in Gorizia, readopt the difference of the animal through a physical transformation process. Thus, the human and the animal like natures merge together and revive totally indefinable creatures. So his work shows a constantly varying Phantasy which inspires the observer to regard the transformation on his own self.

In contrast the scenarios of sculptor Susan Donath, working in Dresden, portray the animal –for instance an amphibian, a snail or a fish – as the unquestioned main character which defines nature as well as human habitats. In a subtle, ironic way she points our view onto the tragic lack of illusion in the present time.

Both artists explore through different artistic media areas of collective memory full of nightmares and wishful imaginations.

ROBERTO KUSTERLE
Roberto Kusterle is not only a photographer: he uses the photographic medium but exclusively as the last level of a creative, multiform and laborious process, which begins so far away and founds in the photographic registration the chartered medium for the crystallization of the images.

All his research implicates, after the initial intuition, a set of competences and specific capacities: the artist demonstrates to master them confidentially and imaginatively. Kusterle is first of all a director, then a sculptor, a decorator, a costume designer, a make-up artist, a “magician”, and finally a photographer.

The Anglo-Saxons define this kind of photography “staged photography”: it could be also defined “photography of a staging” or “theatrical photography”. In fact the oldest images of Kusterle’s artistic production seem to be extracted from the big theatre of life and, more specifically, from a dream world, which interacts with our rational and conscious life.

Thanks to the participating complicity of his models, the artist stages what he defines “rituals of the body”. The body represents the centre of Kusterle’s research: this probe leads the body back in time to his primitive origins through many animal connotations, that are expressed both in the mimetic cutaneous dress and in the dedication to magic and archaic rituals and that make the body protagonist of hybridizations and grafts between animal and vegetable.

Sometimes these rituals are part of a sort of self built mythology, rich of old and classical references that are immersed in a surreal atmosphere, painted by surreal eroticism or by sarcastic irony that dilutes some hard tones.

Kusterle’s strident and harmonic fusions, sort of visual slaps, hang in the balance between horrid and funny, amazing and grotesque.

These dualities sweet-bitter, reality-dream, true-false are constant in all Kusterle’s works.

From a technical point of view, Kusterle chooses, in all this part of his production, black and white print resolution because of its capacity in setting the subjects in an another dimension, different from reality. Moreover, Kusterle uses in his prints special toning and photographic bath that give to the image an old style tone and a sort of metallic appearance.

Then, in order to skip out excessive and iperdetailed realism, Kusterle uses a personal reproduction technique that applies a plastic and contemporaneously soft lighting and shapes the subjects through a pulpy matter.

All these clarifications are not a kind of manic reading but just a due appreciation of Kusterle’s tekné, which is etymologically a form of art.

Kusterle is creating a new condition in photography: he uses in a new, in a different way the space and its perception.

Finally, all Kusterle’s production wants the observer to be involved in a visual adventure that sometimes seems to be quite visionary: this involvement reduces the usual parasitic and voyeuristic behaviour of the spectator.

Kusterle transforms dream in reality, his photography converts reality in a witty and elegant deceit: believing in this deceit inevitably becomes fascinating.

Guido Cecere