Critic Text
"Beat Me" a pictorial requiem to hallucination and desire!
The two monographs, Rae: A Pictorial Love Song and Beat Me: A Pictorial Requiem to Hallucination and Desire, feature the work of London-based photographer/musician Paula Rae Gibson and Swiss photographer/filmmaker Beat Kuert. If looking and attraction are foundational to photography, then Eyemazing Editions gravitates toward its sensual counterparts, “hallucination and desire,” as Kuert’s subtitle suggests. It’s an experience that derives itself from the layouts as much as the subject matter. Immersive sequencing and prints that run to the margins, or overrun them into gatefolds, create momentum and a kind of seductive energy.
Steven Brown for the great Review! Collier Brown editor @ 21ST Editions
"Beat Me" a pictorial requiem to hallucination and desire!
Beat once wrote to me:
Susan, I want to compact the world and frame it in a single image and this is exactly what I tried to do, to compact his world of imagination and his thirst for sensuality into a monograph that gathers together his vision, and his intuitive, complex, mysterious, unreal, and wild existence nourished by his passion for ethereal female beauty. The result is a melancholic volume packed with emotion.
Susan A. Zadeh (Eyemazing Susan)
www.eyemazingeditions.com / http://www.eyemazingeditions.com/order/book
Beat Kuert and his Wunderkammer - The alchemy of art
It has been written, that the creative process leading to an artwork, is an actual artifice since it strives to alter the means and the materials of its expression. It is a process of idealization and realization, which aims to transform the perceivable aspect of matter, but also aims to occasion a sense of wonder and amazement, by displaying an image which reveals different and unsuspected meanings beyond simple appearances. Accordingly, art is in many ways related to alchemy and magic.
Enzo Di Martino, May 2012
from WUNDERKAMMER, dust&scratches © 2012
Beat Kuert, Moving Earth
There are few artists, past or present, who have the vision or talent to show the full spectrum of the female: from the sensual and the erotic, to the duality of being both the creator and the destroyer. Beat Kuert is one of the few artists with the vision and talent to undertake such an endeavor and to do so with a unique mastery of color, form, movement and myth.
David Ben Kay, Owner and Curator - Yuanfen New Media Art Space – Beijing 798
from KAN, dust&scratches © 2010
Desire, Shaping, Concretized, …, Termination - On the Photography of Beat Kuert
Born in 1946, Switzerland, Beat Kuert is a contemporary artist involved in different fields including film, video art and photography. No matter what form his image work takes, one thing is unchanging: the focus on mankind’s desire. To discuss desire through images, the destination is not desire itself, but the essential topic of life and death triggered by desire.
In Chinese, the words色情 (pornography) and 情色(Eros) share the same character: 色 (color). From the word formation of色欲 (lust), we can see that color(色) and desire（欲）are inseparable. The works of Beat Kuert center on feminine bodies, but they depart from traditional body photography’s routine of accurate depiction. With an overwhelming sense of expansion, and extremely expressive colors, they put desire directly in the face of the viewers, while the employment of large areas of warm or cold colors directly connects the viewers with the picture, giving them an experience vivid and real. The body images by Beat Kuert convert bodies into flat-images by means of large color fields. Through resolute compression of shapes and colors of tangled bodies, through simplification of details, he weaves out a more subjective visual reality of bodies: purer, and consequently stronger. Such a visual reality has certain characteristics of painting, and also some characteristics of image because of the technical nature of photo imaging. Apparently, Beat Kuert’s dramatic employment of colors can’t be analyzed separately from his profound contemplation on desire. To him, color is both a stress and a restriction on desire. From his arrangement of various colors, we can feel the complexity of desire that he wants to display, and also his own complicated feelings about desire.
Gu Zheng, art critic
from Destroyed Lines, dust&scratches © 2008
A War between Narration and Image: Digital Image Art by Swiss Artist Beat Kuert
The works of Beat Kuert can not be easily demarcated by a specific art type. In his art, various elements are fused into an organic whole, hard to be dissected in an analytical way. His rich art experiences contribute much to this fact.
In the stage when film was first born, or the age of the Lumière, the lens of camera imitated human eyes to observe the world. A bit curiously and timidly, it watched the outside world. So is this “world” observed from the camera different from the one that we see with our eyes? The answer is obvious, for otherwise mankind wouldn’t have been so fascinated by what’s shown on the screen. But what on earth is this “difference”? It’s the characteristic of “narration” reflected on the screen. Although the shooting process of the early operator of camera was disordered and subconscious, with the intrinsic logic of images being revealed when they flicker on the screen, human being’s potential of “narration” got demonstrated. Such potential comes from man’s childhood experience, when a child acquires the most basic ability of describing images, he can use this ability to describe a narrative “plot” to you, maybe from his own experience, or perhaps just a fantasy. In short, the moment when image came into being, the possibility of linking what happened “before” and “after” it in time and space had come into existence: centering around “Dasein (existence)”, the linear logic connecting what’s past and after it in time, this is what’s called “narration”.
Wu Hong, art critic
from Destroyed Lines, dust&scratches © 2008
At the meeting of “virus,” body, shadow…..
Beat Kuert is a video artist from Switzerland. He has been experimenting with the language of video for many years, using a post-editing technique similar to computer imaging software that distorts and de-familiarizes real images to create a unique visual vocabulary. He uses this visual language as the visual elements that make up poor quality prints or silk-screen images to create severe displacement and deviation from the real world: he screens out in-between colors through this filtering process, leaving behind two extremes of black, white and intense reds, greens, yellows, blues—primitive colors. What does red signify? Do these provocative man-made colors reveal the artist’s inner fears, or sweet sensuality?
Zhang Xiaotao, chinese artist
from Destroyed Lines, dust&scratches © 2008
Same Steps with Time - On the Video Art of Beat Kuert
(...) In surveying Kuert’s video, he is gifted at transforming especially simple, ordinary everyday behavior into a gorgeous visual story. When he creates videos, he strives to go beyond a simple recording; rather, he takes the visual movement in video and displays all of its expressive abilities to the fullest extent by employing multiple editing techniques and applying contemporary digital procedures. The objective is to
emphasize the feeling of movement in video, how it surpasses television conceptually and to create video that encompasses these three dimensions: one is to confront reality, two is simple recording, and the third dimension is the conceptual intervention and recombination of visual elements of video. (...)
Wang Chunchen, art critic and Head of the Department of Curatorial Research of CAFA Art Museum at the China Central Academy of Fine Arts Beijing
September 25, 2008, China Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing
from Destroyed Lines, dust&scratches © 2008
An immaterial symbolism - Art and video art
It has often been said, that procedures in art are in a certain way connected to a kind of alchemy, since, on the one hand, they transform the matter with the use of more traditional methods of painting and sculpture, and in the same time, give body to fantastic visions: imaginary and unreal, but still persistent and capable of steadily occupying our imagination.
Beat Kuert has a good knowledge of art history, and his work, even if it manifests itself through the contemporary means of expression such as television, computer and photography, shows, with all possible obviousness, those particular influences; both ideal and formal.
Enzo Di Martino
from DONNA CARNIVORA, dust&scratches © 2007