The Big Dipper

Migration in Three Pictures

Flavio Bonetti’s images of the ‘Big Dipper’ evoke scenes by Hieronymus Bosch, swarming with people, figures, objects and actions which have the appearance and the visual impact of symbols. At the same time they speak of the everyday and of things one sees in flea markets, where we find all kinds of objects piled up, scattered, and mixed together: the poorer the market, the more interesting the jumble.

The way in which the figures and the objects are located in space and relate to each other triggers immediate meanings: crowds, great quantity and distribution are structural elements that speak to us of the Last Judgement, migrations and deportation. Of major social or legendary phenomena that are highly symbolic, whether they occur, or have occurred on earth or in men’s minds: terminal phenomena, which indicate times of profound crisis, be it historical, economic, cultural, or moral.

Bonetti’s ‘Big Dipper’, organised in three pictures (the City/River, the Sea and the Big Dipper), speaks of products. What is more extreme and terminal than merchandise these days? What can be more symbolic? Nothing, we think. The goods which we continuously produce, and with which we dramatically surround ourselves, fill every corner of the world and every corner of our hearts. They tell the tale of our contemporary condition of existence most clearly and most effectively.

In the pictures we find all sorts of objects, especially small, useless ones, odds and ends, as the artist calls them; those things one finds on top of furniture, at the back of drawers, or hanging on key-rings, things we choose to make small presents of, or that we typically find together with other products in the form of ‘free gifts’. Goods added to other goods, ‘extra’ goods, multiplied to the power of two and three. Unnecessary objects. Small things which often, however, have the power to turn themselves into objects of sentimental value, thereby becoming dramatically useful once again, in a clear demonstration of the fact that goods are also powerful symbols of our daily lives.

In a short text Flavio Bonetti quotes a well-known sentence by Walter Benjamin: “Fashion is the ritual by which merchandise asks to be adored”.

Bonetti makes rituality, and the repetitivity (the serial aspect, one might say) which marks it, a precise working motif on which to build his pictures. They thus conjure up the scenes of Bosch for several reasons: because they present a multitude of elements mixed together, but arranged in a clearly designed composition; because these elements belong to different worlds (human figures, food, animals, instruments, machines, pictures); because they are animated, and almost ‘remote controlled’ by a power that seems to follow the imperatives of a ritual and because, finally, they are in some ways mysterious.