Roberta Valtorta

A sort of strange, irregular religiousness, a questioning and critical one, circulates in these images, as in Bosch’s paintings. The scenes depict situations of ‘finality’ (which can be identified with the iconography of the Last Judgement, large scale migration and exodus), beyond which we do not know what we will find or if we will find anything.

We are confronted with a theatre of goods: pursuing a strange destiny, these replace everything, both the landscape and the people. In the first scene, the objects take the form of a city with a river running through it; in the second, they turn their back on us and head off on a long journey, marching toward the infinite, all of them fixing their gaze on the distant horizon of the sea; and finally, in the third scene the objects are scattered in the pitch-black sky, like stars.

The Big Dipper’ is more than this. It is, for instance, a reflection on still life, a concept that is investigated and expanded here to its utter limits. A still life can be a composition of fruit on a table, or the composition of the whole world: the landscape of the earth seen from an aeroplane is a still life, the planet Earth seen from the moon, and the stars in the sky - which we name, calling them, for example, a ‘dipper’- also compose a still life.

With the progress of civilization, man (Western man in particular) has superimposed his mental order on nature, gradually transforming the landscape from ‘natural’ to ‘artificial’. We know that with the help of tools first and machines later the process of redesigning and appropriating the world was increasingly rapid and that this process has become even more incisive and loaded with meaning since the beginning of the age of technology. It is at this moment in history that goods become the dominant aspect of life, in correspondence with the full blossoming of artificiality.

Flavio Bonetti’s still life-landscapes refer to a nature that is now distant (he recalls it in absolute terms: the river, the sea, the sky) and they are completely artificial. Here and there we find a single leaf, a lemon, the hat of an acorn, a shell, grains of salt, a symbolic apple – but everything else is a representation: they are objects, useful or useless, conceived and constructed by men and machines, in different forms and made of a variety of materials, shaped by industrial and post-industrial civilization, whether it be a washing machine or a cow, a boat or a pig, a woman, a paper-clip, a Coca-Cola bottle, a train or a duck, a snake, a man riding a bicycle or two little birds in their nest. In the three pictures we find both natural and cultural things in the form of objects, all equally reproduced and re-created, all covered in, or rather imbued with, artificiality.

A further important element in ‘The Big Dipper’ is the miniaturisation of the world and, at the same time, the loss of scale. Bonetti-Gulliver has used miniature objects that reproduce very large ones in small and has placed them next to objects that are small in reality, inventing a new scale of measurement and a new space, both common and unifying, linked on one hand to the world of dreams and on the other to the dimension of children’s play. This operation of alienation has to do with the mechanism of the ready-made, by means of which the object, by the mere fact of being offered to the gaze of those who look at it, takes on a new identity and a new significance. We are thus in the presence of a collection of ready-made items, or of a ready-made world that is highly complex and stratified, containing many stories within it, and which is capable of producing many meanings, one after the other. The task of the photograph is to record and bear witness to the existence and complexity of the situation.