Exhibition · Francesca Minini · Milano
Skin Game marks a natural and more deliberate evolution in James Bantone’s ongoing exploration of the body as a vulnerable, unstable image. At the center of the exhibition, skin appears as a sensitive threshold—one that absorbs pressures, desires, and unconscious forms of deception. The new works—spanning sculpture, photography, image transfers, and material interventions—deepen Bantone’s exploration of surfaces and their instability, shifting the focus from artificial bodies to the ways images can be touched, worn, or wounded, and how they begin to operate like skin itself. Within Skin Game, the body becomes an image, and images behave like skin: seductive, fragile, and never entirely trustworthy. Moving through desire, intimacy, and unease, this new chapter opens onto a deeper examination of the image’s inherent fragility. — Eleonora Milani James Bantone was born in Geneva, Switzerland (1992) and he currently lives and works between Geneva and Paris. The artist graduated with a Bachelor of Art & Media – Video at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) in 2019 and completed the Work.Master – Contemporary Artistic Practices at the Geneva University of Art and Design (HEAD) in 2021. James Bantone’s practice moves across photography, sculpture, painting, and video, treating the image as a surface where desire, classification, and projection accumulate. Working with found and self-produced imagery, he is less interested in representation as likeness than in the conditions through which a subject becomes readable: how a surface is charged, misrecognized, circulated, and made available to fantasy, value, and consumption. Through transfer, fragmentation, corrosion, and overpainting, Bantone interrupts the apparent coherence of the image. Photographs are displaced across supports such as steel and aluminium, strained through processes of reproduction, and made to behave less like windows than skins: handled, marked, unstable, and exposed. In recent works, Bantone turns…