Robert Longo

LipanjePuntin, Trieste
Through November 15

In the series ‘Superheroes’, Robert Longo takes toy figures of comic strip characters and photographs them, blowing the images up large-scale. His work draws inspiration from the figurative culture of the 1970s and post-human, cyborg imagery. Such interest in comic strip characters can be traced back to the 1960s. It is reflected in the work of artists such as Lichtenstein or Warhol, who re-elaborated images of Dick Tracy. It was during these same years that the notion of the superhero was born and rapidly gained in popularity. This might be viewed, in a certain sense, as a reaction to the dull uniformity resulting from the diffusion of mass culture at the time.

Longo’s decision to adopt such imagery follows the cinema’s recent reawakening of interest in superheroes. In film format the superhero loses the 'roughness’ typical of early cartoon designs, taking on the cyborg characteristics and gloss found in Longo’s photographs. Longo’s 1996 film, Johnny Mnemonic, is another of the artist’s forays into the same theme. We can immediately note the difference between Longo’s superheroes and those from the 1960s in a very physical sense, by looking at the support the works are produced on. The perfection of cibacrome replaces the cheap paper of trash publications used in the 1960s.

These tiny figures, scaled up by the artist in his photos, are only minor cartoon characters. The series forms a rich assortment of strange powered beings including Goddess, Hexadecimal, Purgatory, Youngblood and a curious Artic Batman. Sporting not the usual black hat and mask, but white ones, Artic Batman is a mutation of the Batman we know and love, the product of genetic evolution. Following the concept of the survival of the fittest, Batman’s transformation is market induced: a commercial product must adapt if it wants to last.

The power of the market to dictate the form of the superhero stands in contrast to natural evolution. Longo’s Superheroes, at the deepest level, are a metaphor for man’s present condition. A condition ever more subject to the laws of commerce, which change our habits and require us to constantly develop new abilities and strengths.




Guido Comis
Translation by Rosalind Furness