Artist: Antonio Kutleša
Mentor: full profesor artist Ines Krasić
Academy of Fine Art, Zagreb
Author of proposal: Jurica Mlinarec
Mentor: dr.sc. Lovorka Magaš Bilandžić
Department of Art History, Faculty of Human Science, University of Zagreb
Artists were fascinated by the human body throughout history of art, and Antonio Kutleša’s work certainly extends that continuity. After he detected the increasingly intense interventions that the human body was exposed to in order to maximize its strength and adaptability in new conditions, the artist problematizes limits of such development by constructing a new body using 3D printing technologies.
The artist uses this work to examine the extent of an absolutely utopian notion of technologically upgrading the human body so that it could respond to tasks in the real and virtual sphere. He creates a kind of visual oxymoron that emphasizes antithetical positions of the organic and the mechanic, whereby contemporary means of surveillance (cameras) are added to humanoid forms, made from decoupaging various animal forms, which in the artist’s modular human body assume the position of the eyes. The starting point is a print, transformed into a series of objects that create the modular body in human size, made by 3D printing machines. By uploading the graphic file into the software, the artist is able to infinitely rotate and examine from different perspectives the previous two-dimensional form, thus emancipating new points of view.
The potential of transhumanist enthusiasm and its commodification is also present in the branding strategy, particularly in drawing attention to the creation of the recognizable visual identity and packaging that contains spare body parts, which enable constant circulation and perpetual transposition of unhealthy parts in order to achieve maximum efficiency and adaptability of the body to contemporary trends. This affirms not only the hybrid position of contemporary man who resides in the triangle of the organic, mechanical and virtual, but also the aforementioned need to change one’s body for potential physical, aesthetic and other demands.
Jurica Mlinarec
