About the Project
Paradoxes and other adventures of contemporaneity
Critique by Gigliola Foschi
Marco Guenzi is explicitly tackling the contradictions, the dramas and the absurdities of our contemporary world. We are afflicted from all directions by news, events, behaviors, advertising and whatnot. But how can we react to this deluge of disturbing information? How can we behave without turning our head away in order not to see, or without surrendering to anguish or depressive helplessness?
Marco Guenzi, artist, economist, lecturer and web designer, chooses to react through bitter, paradoxical and disorienting laughter. His images zoom in deeply and simultaneously expand outwards starting from some of the most pressing problems of our complex and interconnected time where new political, economic, social, technological and cultural issues overlap continuously. He is putting forth work that analyses our times, purposefully exposing contradictions. He creates images that feed on a pop and hyper-colored aesthetic and are based on demystifying humor. Marco Guenzi contrasts the affirmative, one-way and super-obvious photographs that are omnipresent on the web with images capable of disturbing and raising doubts without conceptualizing beyond comprehension.
Imagination underlying his oeuvres commits us to an extremely serious game, where laughter becomes an unbearable paradox for the authoritative and self-assured reason. “The comic is a contradiction” – wrote Kierkegaard. “Laughter is a leap from possible to impossible and from impossible to possible” – closely continues Bataille. The tragicomic humor, inasmuch serious negation of seriousness, indeed opens the world to a double and paradoxical thought that shakes our confidence and drags us into making new ethical considerations.
Joachim Schmid, well-known artist, declared in 1989 (the 150th anniversary of the invention of photography): “No new photographs until all the old ones have been used.” Well – in tune with that statement - Marco Guenzi too is not shooting any new image. Nevertheless, unlike Schmid or Erik Kessel, he is not gathering old abandoned pictures or is he reutilizing pictures from family albums photos. He is not interested in vernacular photography, or in cataloguing. His attention is directed to the present and not in “reactivating” a more or less distant past. Aren’t we constantly overwhelmed by constant wave of images? So Marco, in tune with our age, enters this flood of images, collecting and carefully re-assembling them (thanks to complex interventions using modern digital instruments). He does this to create a peculiar composition, in which photographs, titles, and hidden sentences (to be closely and thoroughly read) succeed in putting in relation contrasting and strident realities.
The Dadaist artists of photomontage, John Heartfield, Raoul Hausmann and Hannah Höch are his masters. They too put together the images they took from illustrated newspapers and recent events articles, in a subversive and disorienting way. In a more modern manner, Marco begins from the web and builds works full of multi-meaning and temporal details to be looked into, in which images and texts play together so as to create a paradoxical device spreading in multiple directions. He is no longer interested in upsetting the small minded middle class (which is disappearing). He is instead offering works that have the explicit objective of making you think. His images bear the heavy burden of our apprehensions, and reverse them by means of a uncanny laugh, opening us up to more creative meaning, to an act of thinking beyond what is already known.
The world beyond the common sense (Para-Doxa)
Presentation of the Artist
I gave my all to this project that lasted a full 10 years, from 2015 to the present. My intention is to raise public awareness on certain issues, following an alternative approach to traditional photo-journalism. Plato himself argued that ethics and aesthetics have a common basis.
The idea was born out of the contradictory and dramatic nature of the world we live in. An extremely turbulent and anxiogenic reality, which at times can even seem surreal. Nowadays, we almost all feel that we are somehow inert victims of what is happening around us. On a daily basis we are bombarded with news, images, advertisements, dramas, curiosities and oddities, coming at us from the media and the net. All this information strains everyone’s nerves and emotional stability. Our own identity and worldview then become increasingly uncertain and fragmented: so difficult to conceive that we often end up painting things in black and white.
Not believing that I am alone in this condition, I decided to turn this puzzlement into images, making a big parody of the contemporary world. In this sense, following the principles of Adorno’s aesthetic theory, this project aims to bear witness to the era in which we live.
Thus, I chose to represent through art a grotesque and paradoxical reality - ironic in some ways, even sarcastic in others - capable of making us first reflect and then accept with a smile (sometimes bitter) the problems that plague us.
Behind the obvious amazement at a surreal world is shaped the acknowledgment that such situations are not so far removed from those in which we live. The line between amusing and perturbing then becomes very blurred. This happens because in the paradox it is the signified (the meaning) that is surreal, but the signifier (the representation) maintains a seeming coherence.
For Freud, art, when helps us to grasp without undue disturbance a repressed thought hidden in our unconscious, can act against anxiety and move us toward problem solving. In this sense, it becomes not only aesthetically pleasing, but also useful. And it can speak to children too.
If we further consider that we live in an epistemic age, in which artificial intelligence gives us the illusion of knowing what we do not actually know, the paradox challenges our arrogance. Like a worm gnawing at the mind, it brings us back to the Socratic doubt of “I know that I know nothing”. All of this serves as the starting point for a critical and constructive reflection (at least, one hopes).
In this project, I decided to create my works by assembling images I take from the net, producing real digital collages. Nowadays billions of new images are created daily, most of them without any cultural value, which are soon destined for oblivion. There is no point in producing new ones, given the existing iconographic overabundance. So, I decided to recycle them and give them new life, by means of new meanings. In this respect I could almost call myself an “ecologist of the image” (I’m not the first to do it, after all).
I start with the idea or a shot that strikes me. Once clarified the intent of the work, I then exhume by means of search engines the raw material. I finally go on to do intricate interlocking work between figurative elements, using photo editing software.
The communication style and the language employed, consisting of a collage of images and commentary text, is similar to that found every day by surfing the Internet. It does not differ much from that of memes, commercials and fake news.
In choosing source images, I take only high-definition ones. This allows me to get very large formats and to include a lot of detail so that I can create a small story.
Without the narrative and symbolic element, photography loses an important part of itself. And this is what is unfortunately increasingly found in the mainstream of contemporary art, to which fortunately (or unfortunately) I do not feel I belong.