20 Apr 2010

Daniele Buetti at AEROPLASTICS contemporary, Brussels

Daniele Buetti
'Oh Boy ! oh Boy! '

During his visit to the Monreale Cathedral in Palermo, Daniele Buetti was deeply marked – who wouldn't be? – by its mosaics dating from the 12th century that grace the interior's walls. Beyond the aesthetic emotion, he no doubt also recognized a kinship as to form with his own work, which for several years now has integrated qualities of luminous energetic flux, like a ballet of photons on golden backgrounds set down by Byzantine artists. But for his own mosaics, Daniele Buetti had recourse to none of these precious materials. The images – found ones, for the most part – are glued to sheets of Plexiglas, then cut-out by laser into multitude fragments in various shapes and sizes. The compositions, very colourful, are of monumental format and transpose exploded imagery in modern materials. The subjects are not easily decrypted – an effect carefully sought-for by Buetti, who prefers suggestion to overt demonstration, inspired by Christian iconography and more particularly in saintly representations – marked by a form of violence within which transpire submission, repression and subjugation.

This idea of constraint is again taken up in a large drawing, one that also marks the transition between the current exhibition and previous works. The suspended human form, hair weighed down by a stone, evokes the morbid iconography of martyrs, in a style both meticulous and cold. Further, a personage who holds between his hands the energy radiating outwards from his body: a retouched photograph, referring as much via its iconography as its technique to digital collages from the series 'Is My Soul Losing Control'. Images attached to outsized placards, faces whose eyes exude a flux of immaterial tears, evoke the light-boxes conceived by Buetti: set to form in an installation at once fragile by virtue of its materials and imposing by virtue of its size, they acquire a quite particular significance. As for the portrait 'overloaded' by an indefinable form, thick matter of oil-colours on photographic paper, it is characteristic of Daniele Buetti's interest for the grotesque and the tragicomic, for the grand human comedy of our existence. The title chosen by the artist for his exhibition is pregnant with ambiguity: 'Oh boy oh boy' – are we to rejoice or lament?

PY Desaive