Bruno Guastalla – portfolio
Contact the artist
https://traceof.space
brunoguastalla[at]yahoo.com
Exhibition information
Gardens: beautiful, intense, pleasurable, alive.
And also, within a 21st century framing, they can be seen as reflecting control and lack of control.
Rousham’s 17th Century splendid walled garden hints at a dangerous wilderness outside its walls. The wilderness is harnessed in William Kent’s extraordinary English Garden of about 1740, suggesting a mastery which can be exerted to the horizon and beyond.
At Sissinghurst and Great Dixter, the room-like forms express their makers’ artistic sensibilities (respectively Vita Sackville-West and Christopher Lloyd): sensual, intellectual and Dyonisian.
Although not strictly gardens, included here are two views of the Hoo Peninsula, on the Thames Estuary. The Milton rifle range near Gravesend (19th C and still in use). In the distance, on the right is a firing butt, and on the left, a few feral ponies and Tilbury on other side of the estuary. The abandoned Shornemead Fort (from the same period) is now host to brambles and expressive graffiti.
“I am watching this man who is motionless in sleep and suddenly he wakes. He opens his eyes. He makes a move toward his hat, which has fallen beside him, and picks it up to protect himself from the sun.
The experience that I make out of my hold on the world is what makes me capable of perceiving another myself, provided that in the interior of my world there opens up a gesture resembling my own. The moment the man wakes up in the sun and reaches for his hat, between the sun which burns me and makes my eyes squint and the gesture which from a distance over there brings relief to my fatigue, a bond is tied without my needing to decide anything.
As long as it adheres to my body, the world exists not only for me but for everyone in it who makes gestures toward it. There is a universality of feeling—and it is upon this that our identification rests, the generalization of my body, the perception of the other.”
(extracts from M. Merleau-Ponty’s ‘The prose of the world” – translated by John O’Neill, published 1973).
Artist information
Born in 1957, Paris. I have worked as a professional violin maker / restorer – as a main activity – since my late teens. I have lived in Oxford UK since 1982. I also play music and make images (photographs and paintings)
I tend to view projects I am occupied with as related to one another. The past is inscribed in the present, in materials, in people, in objects. Record-king activities may be a means to engage with that.
