A corporate report as conceptual intervention

For the 2009 annual report of the Swiss media company Ringier, John Baldessari created not a conventional financial document, but an artist’s book that subverts the language of business, communication, and image production. True to his signature style, Baldessari combines found photography, bold color blocks, brief textual inserts, and playful juxtapositions—at once ironic, precise, and quietly critical.

The report’s factual content becomes part of a visual narrative in which information turns into surface and surface into meaning. Numbers and images collide, overlap, or contradict each other—offering a subtle critique of corporate aesthetics and the visual rhetoric of progress.

As in much of his work, Baldessari challenges the relationship between image and meaning, representation and construction. Here, the corporate report becomes an artist’s book—an artistic gesture inserted into a system that prides itself on rational clarity, yet thrives on symbolic representation.