Daniele Buetti

Swiss artist Daniele Buetti is notorious for his defaced photographs of supermodels, which feature scars, tattoos and disenchanted fragments of text. Buetti has been questioning the socially determined constructs of beauty and the commodification of sexuality and glamour since the 1980s. His altered photographs--large-scale C-prints on aluminum or light-boxes--have messages like “How much is my body worth?” and “What shall I hope for?” scrawled across them in electric colors. Buetti also often energetically scratches out or draws over portions of the image in a manner that recalls the destructive doodling of a truculent adolescent. Maybe You Can Be One of Us focuses on Buetti’s recent drawings, videos, sculptures and installations. In these newer pieces, the fashion models give way to enigmatic illustrative symbols, such as two disembodied hands conjuring a puff of smoke. This publication accompanies an exhibition of new work at the Swiss Institute for Contemporary Art in New York.

Picture it. Claudia and Naomi, Gisele and Kate, supermodels extraordinaire. Their ultra-chic, ultra-thin bodies scrawled over with the phrase: "Never Enough of You" and similarly glossy women made to bear growths on their bodies that resemble the trademarks they're employed to advertise: Levis, Gucci and the like. Such are the lifestyle and media code reformulations that Daniele Buetti has enacted in recent years, bringing the phantasmic effects of mass communication precisely to a point. Such media-driven subjects have seen Buetti dubbed the "new king of pop"--which designation, while royal, short-sights much of the extensive oeuvre he has produced over the last 10 years, a body of work that explores the topic of our consumption-happy society in a much larger context. From Buetti's performance-like beginnings, this monograph moves on to an overview of his most important installations, photographic panels, illuminated boxes and videos, and traces the origins of the "winged cross," Buetti's trademark from the late 80s.