Centering around fractures, damages, and moments of catastrophe that may lead to a symbiotic relationship, paintings newly created by Johannes Bosisio in 2023 turns to look at accident scenes after the "collision" of man and machine in the (post) automobile society. However, in this exhibition, the artist has no intention to portray the brutal and bloody aspects of accidents nor to express categorically any moral stance; instead, the shown paintings freeze some “hyper-static” visual moments: bright colored iron sheets folding, stacking and intersecting with each other; the shiny surface of steel exhibits the patterns resembling that of the literati stones under heavy blows or intense pressure; the damaged edge of the metal material is noticeably dented and upturned, revealing a small bottomless pit; a small piece of hard object piercing through a certain standard mechanical structure with debris scattered. Yet these moments are by no means dirty nor chaotic — they are not reflections of human gazes, it is difficult to pinpoint any societal emotion predominates here; these images rather seem to demonstrate the calm and irreversible fusion of humans and machines, stripping away the absolutely dominant human control — even though humans are no longer present here. This is where the paradox and charm of the young artist’s work locates.
Johannes has lived and worked in various places, including Italy, Berlin, and London, and he considers urban and rural life scenes as his natural benchmarks for selecting different subjects and source materials. The artist has spent a lot of time wandering in urban spaces, photographing scenes and remnants of abandoned vehicles in old automobile factories; through texts of science fiction writer Donna Haraway and philosopher Andy Clark, these interests initially driven by intuition gradually led Johannes to question the concept of cyborg and the relationship between humans and machines.
People nowadays seem to obliviate that the sweet but terrifying analogy “a smartphone is an extended organ of the human body” has a logical precursor: “cars are the shells and legs of the modernists”. Since the late 19th century, with the support of technology, mined resources, and industrial aesthetics, humans have customized movable temples for themselves, creating the ongoing era of automobiles. The implicit shared vision is that once you sit in the driver’s seat with steering wheel in hands, what you gain is not just the ability to reach a spatial destination but also to journey into the future, into time.
However, harm and uneasiness often accompany the progress in perception. In the simplest sense, one of the future times connected by cars is death. The traffic accident rate has always been an inescapable shadow in the century-old history of mechanical road vehicle development, and reckless driving and “death racing” were once cultural undercurrents in the 1950s and 1960s. The automobile industry, a product built on scientific achievements and human rationality (the popularization of automobiles also gave birth to the social and economic system of mass production and consumption known as “Fordism”), exposed its Achilles’ heels and fell into the moment in the realm of sensibility and impulse. In this sense, destruction caused by clash brings about a certain liberation and transcendence from social norms, where the desires of humans and machines (artificial objects) coincides. Johannes’s creative process and his work are equally full of collisions; the damaged machine parts in his paintings can also be seen as pathological slices of modern society where machines collide with human bodies.
The significance of these slices goes beyond mere specimens. Perhaps driven by the lure of "transcending one's own existence", cars have also begun to carry the biological desires projected by humans, serving as one part in constructing a paradigm of super human desire without complete informed consent. In the most extreme scenario, people even gain ecstasy from vehicle collisions: whether they are witnessing or experiencing, the influence of technological rationality and consumerism on the secular world has been almost eliminated in such emotional experiences. Machines, along with their technological aspects, have thus entered the most private, humble and sublime realm of humans. The deviant imagination about sex and reproduction between humans and cars in the movie “Titanium” sends us into the “automobile narrative” of lust, procreation, and reincarnation. In Johannes's paintings, this kind of desire exists in its post-extinguished form, but is corroborated by the occurrence and preservation of trauma: they remain extremely clean, smooth and bright, with sharp edges and even fresh fluids, as if machines were making a proclamation as well as paying homage to their host - humans.
These "hyper-static" images, which almost devoid of human emotions, solidify the separation between humans and artificial objects at the moment before they are about to fade into bones and burnt to dust. This separation has not been achieved even until death and destruction, but rather appear more intimate in such images. The artist attempts to infinitely approach this moment of separation by simply exposing the reality of close combat through paintings in a retrospective tense — they are sharp and beautiful, more like a new birth than destruction. And how could such a newborn be “human-centered”? — cyborgs do not dream of Eden: it is not made of mud, and cannot dream of returning to dust.
Chinese Text / Ren Yue
English Translation / Zhang Zhe
