Artists

James Bantone

Press release

There are images designed to circulate, to be seen and reproduced—a reproducibility that has nothing to do with the nature of the image, but rather with its commercial function—and others that take shape through a body or a movement; still others that depict bodies and gestures. Skin Game, James Bantone’s solo exhibition and his debut in the gallery’s roster, opens up a new realm of possibilities in the artist’s practice, activating a mechanism of reflection that traverses images, bodies, and objects, interweaving them into a circuit of gestures that recur and transform. Skin Game constructs its visual imagery from commercial catalogs of display mannequins, a near-matricial trace in Bantone’s work. Figures designed to showcase bodies that exhibit only apparent neutrality, silhouettes that mimic common gestures. Yet those poses are never truly neutral. They are awkward, seductive, theatrical, and at times openly involuntary. Bantone enters this repertoire with his own body, imitating it, distorting it, and photographing it in place of the mannequins. In the transition from mannequin to artist, the images do not crystallize but recur, duplicate, overlap, and are partially erased. They are manipulated, photographed through screens, printed, and transferred onto metal. The surfaces oxidize, break apart, and flake off. Some parts disappear, others repeat, and still others emerge as scraps or residues of the transfer. With each step, the distinction between the living body and the manufactured body weakens: the mannequin takes on an unexpected corporeality, while the artist’s body, photographed from below, slips and stretches, becoming architectural and synthetic. The exhibition is a mirroring device—both literal and conceptual—in which each image responds to another. A pose migrates from a commercial photograph to a self-portrait, and from the self-portrait to a metal plate. Elsewhere, reflective mannequins share the space with their transferred counterparts. The dichotomy between original and copy is nullified, and the two categories exist in a loop without any hierarchy of representation. In addition to surfaces—which can be conceived as places of transit—Bantone introduces presences that inhabit the space: these bodies are points of view, elements that participate in the construction of the gaze. They are discreet presences that alter the perception of what the images show. This shift reorganizes the gaze and its position—some images retain the frontal orientation of the catalog, presenting the body as something to be examined; others radically shift the point of view. The familiar logic of the exhibition shifts toward something more intimate and ambiguous, where looking becomes a gesture imbued with proximity, desire, and distortion. The mannequins extend this interplay into the gallery space: in addition to echoing the silhouettes and postures of the images, they seem to behave like spectators, occupying positions from which they contemplate the works or observe one another. These are exchanges that are both suggestive and slightly perverse. A body mimics the posture of a mannequin. An object designed to attract the consumer’s gaze becomes an observer. A catalog created to standardize bodies becomes the subject of porous images. Skin Game is conceived around the liminality of the image: it originates in imitation and then moves toward flirtation and distortion—a cycle in which every surface becomes a body, and every body returns to the image. – Eleonora Milani