Andreas Gursky, Klistchko, 1999

As violent reply to the kind world of the theme park, the one portrayed by Andreas Gursky is pervaded by an extreme desolation that hurts the eye. The relentless beauty of the images represents urban and human landscapes of fascinating geometry and distressing silence, cluttered and empty, crowded and deserted at the same time. The obsessive order and progressive stripping of the Prada shelves and the laconic paintings of Turner sum up his own itinerary: from the panoramic views of Salerno and She Tin – where the random regularity of the vehicles on the docks or the parallel rigor of the racetracks contrast with the mountains on the background –to the essential bareness of the hotels, the crowds or the latest landscapes. The titanic and vacuous exactitude of the atriums of Atlanta and Times Square is the best definition of the architecture of anomy; the polychrome clutter of Klistchko or Chicago, the best portrait of the society of spectacle, alienated by the symbolic competition of sports or the stock market; and the frozen neutrality of the commercial zone or the impassive Rhine, the best proof of the indifferent urbanity and the final silence of the turn-of-the-century territories of consumerism and absence...[+]