Daniele Buetti

Daniele Buetti became internationally known in the 1990s with a major group of works entitled Looking for Love. The first installations of this name were large pinwalls, consisting in clusters of manipulated images of glamorous models from fashion magazines taped to the wall. The result is reminiscent of a teenager’s room, covered in posters and cuttings of his or her favorite pop-stars and heroes. The mainly color images, all of different format, feature glamorous models; these are treated by the artist with pseudo tattoos and scarifications, raising issues of beauty and individuality, but also of pain, and loneliness.

The nature of reality and the function of our emotions is Buetti’s ongoing concern. His scenarios use the language and tools of visual seduction, familiar to us through our exposure to advertising and the media. Thus, the artist initially conveys us to a world of apparent desirable happiness and fame. Buetti, however, looks behind the curtains of high-gloss limelight to reveal the frailness of appearances, together with the anxiety and insecurity behind an immaculate façade. He equips his beauties with speech bubbles for them to express unspoken, very personal feelings, far from their consumer appeal. We are lead to reflect on our own emotional experience of the close and infinitely precarious, but also emotional relationship between appearance and reality, exaltation and despair. The artist’s relationship to sentimentality is ambivalent: on the one side, he has a certain pleasure in succumbing to the magic of passion; on the other side he painfully discloses the mechanics of emotions. He guides the viewer into familiar mental spaces by provoking long felt desires. Buetti avoids postulating any kind of judgment: it is up to the viewer to let the image infiltrate his or her emotional world. Does the image create reality, or is it the other way round? Buetti’s images are subtle in that they are quite obviously fakes with a pretence to reality: when he sets up On All Knees in the Helmhaus in Zurich (2003) – where the whole interior of the building would seem to have been dragged out from some universal cataclysm – the suggested catastrophe is a convincing physical experience and yet clearly set-up in the sense of a walk-in film set. The Helmhaus piece is a chapter from the series Romantic World: Buetti openly acknowledges his empathy for romantic forms of expression, individuality and existentialism. However powerful the detailed images of the intervention may be, it is only in experiencing them in situ that the viewer can be absorbed in their awe and feel the full discomfort of their impact.

Buetti develops his work complexes during a number of years, exploring issues in a medium adapted from popular culture, specifically created for the subject. The header-name given to each work complex is an integral part of the piece; usually in English, it follows basic laws of global accessibility. Once Buetti feels that a particular area of concern has been completely exploited, he moves on. Sensitive to mass culture and headline issues, he subsequently builds up new aesthetic strategies for a campaign including new paradigma of what makes the world turn. Within this diversification of expression, his themes remain closely related. Characteristic of his work is a choice of unsophisticated materials and techniques: his practice includes cardboard, tape, wallpaper, party lights and decorations, household paint and the use of on-site situations. His source material he often finds in newspapers and magazines; It can also be inspired by TV series or movie films. The use of popular images from advertising enables the viewer to access his work on an emotional rather than an intellectual level. His visual catalogue of concerns touches on fashion, football, cataclysms, terrorism, beauty, love, death, religion, to mention only the major themes.

Daniele Buetti (born 1955 in Fribourg, Switzerland) is a visual artist working in various media, principally installation and intervention. His work includes photography, video, sound, drawing, sculpture, and digitally assisted work. Since 2004 he is professor at Münster Academy of Fine Arts. He lives and works in Zurich and Münster.