Luca Buvoli |
| by Stephen Pusey |
|
Wherever You Are Not, 1996, is a beautifully hand-drawn animated 16mm silent film,
Chandleresque by device, and charmingly tongue-in-cheek. Through the eyes of an
amnesiac private investigator, 'A . . . .', We retrace the disadventures of the antithetical
protagonist Not-A-Superhero, and his encounters with the archetypal characters of Buvoli's
creation, Dissector, Dr. Logos, Patternman, The Lord Of Guilt, and Meta-phora. Not-A-
Superhero's fate is a continuing disappearance and reassemblence of his identity.
From perusing the artist's books of collage and drawings, we gather that Not-A-
Superhero was once Supermark, who had lost his invulnerability in a devastating
explosion, or revelation. Dissector, attempts to discover his true identity and dislocates him,
throwing the parts into the river. He is betrayed and left "meaningless but nonetheless still alive", by
Dr. Logos, who represents Cartesian logic, Western rationalism, and the absolute Word of
God. Patternman (a reincarnation of the artist's childhood bedroom wallpaper) lures him
with his uniforming power, and he "slips between the visible and invisible". As if all this were not
enough, The Lord of Guilt seizes him with a grip of moral reprimands and he is forced to
split himself into pieces, to escape.
It would be wrong to assume that this nebulous character ever really dies for as we are told
Not-A-Superhero, "could not lose his existence because he never had one." He is aided in his
reconstitution by Meta-phora, a lady of indeterminate hair colour, and the Isis to his Osiris.
She has the miraculous gift of making "reassemblances between things, fragments of a large number
of possible orders". His resurrection is always made possible through her mediation, he is healed
through her feminine salve of imagination. Not-A-Superhero is neither hero nor antihero,
for he exists only in the absence of his existence — rather, he is an inversion of the archetypal
superhero.
Buvoli's sculptures are frail, spindly wires, partly sheathed with a colored or clear insulation, that
draw startling shapes in space as they spurt across a wall, or from floor to ceiling. If you look
carefully, you won't find Not-A-Superhero, but his stand-in attributes — cape, armour,
boots, gloves — all delicately made of candy wrappers and pieces of old clothing, following erratic
trajectories, decreasing in size, till they appear to vanish. Around the gallery are his arch enemies.
Dr. Logos, a robot scaffold of crossword puzzles, strides across an askew Renaissance
perspective grid which looks barely sufficient to support the weight of his learned paces. The
Lord of Guilt, like a black-robed Jesuit, whirls around in a fury of accusations, hurling fire,
damnation, and thorned hearts, from atop his mountain of righteousness. Patternman is a
quilted overlay of structures across one wall, that seems to simultaneously contract and expand, as if
it is undergoing a process of replication.
The most astonishing sculpture in this show is the title work Wherever You Are Not.
Made out of wire, plexiglass and fabric, it describes a screen that is shot through with projector rays,
so that the title falls in a diaphanous cascade of lettering in the space beyond it. The screen does not
serve as a reflector here — it is the threshold to another zone in which the words become scrambled
and absorbed by their shadows. Indeed, the use of the shadow is so purposeful in Buvoli's work. His
objects are ephemeral solids suspended in space, that may metamorphize in an instant, yet the
shadows they cast are a testimony of their solidity, the vestiges of their existence.
In developing a central character from his absence, and assembling his identity from just the
traces of his existence, Luca Buvoli creates a paradox that touches upon concerns fundamental to the
creative process as well as to contemporary society. Disembodiment is a constant subject of
contemporary discourse as minds project themselves through computers into networked space —
"You will perish in your own projection" — threatens Dr. Logos. The dilemma of
contemporary thought is the inability to distinguish clear polarities, such as good or evil, but to
consider instead, how they are qualified, and made equivalent, by all the factors in between. The
artist is compelled to externalize the inexpressible so that it can be recognized or made fact as objects
which may eventually form a whole — so the artist is always the sum total of this fragmented
"Other". The process is, of course, never completed — but always, "to be continued . . ."
|