In the series of female images Kusterle is inspired by the contemporary meaning of beauty and external perfection, burdened by the un-acceptance of what is natural and inevitable. In lack of inner harmony and the respect for the dignity of ageing, contemporary aesthetics vainly approaches interventions to the body, while the author starts the process from the opposite direction. He covers a young body with signs of age and thus contrastingly confronts youthful freshness with wrinkles and withered skin.
Other images representing human monologue or the interlacing of several figures, which seem to be loosing their individual boundaries and natural shapes, are molded into a new conglomerate, united into a fantasy creature or changed into an association of something else – only careful observation with quite some imagination can uncover the reconstruction of actual staging of these models. The author exploits the mirror image of the human body, built of two similar halves on the outside with unique proportions between its parts, which all cause the viewer to misidentify human extremities in front of him/her. His mirror is a self-reflection of relationships, social and existential questions which are symbolically captured in each specific composition. Kusterle’s work cannot be labeled purely as photographic. His photographs are the result of an accurate and intended optical effect; the author first uses the roles of a painter, a sculptor and a scenographer and thus creates the conditions for his motif by physically handling the body and positioning it. The camera comes in at the very end and in its most classic role – to document the staging in front of it.