The works included, which are mostly photographic, address among other things the pain of estrangement, the embarrassment of memory, the panic of oblivion, and the fragility of intimacy.” Staged in all three gallery spaces, The Ongoing Story is comprised of recent text-based works, photographs, and vinyl wall text, all yielding from Alejandro Cesarco’s multifarious practice. He describes the works included as such:
Down & Across (I & II), 2020. Archival ink‑jet prints; 119 × 83 cm each.
“A series of drawings made during the first months of Covid‑19 lockdown which document, through color and received clues, a period of apparent suspended meaning.”
Errata, 2021. Archival inkjet print; 40 × 57 cm.
“An acknowledgment of past mistakes, a way of saying “I’m sorry”.
An Angry Silence, 2022. Paint on the wall; dimensions variable.
“A new wall drawing in line with previous forms of “muted melodrama.” In this case a visual equivalent of the consequences of hiding things under the rug.”
The Long Term (A Measure of Intimacy I, II, IV), 2020. Archival ink‑jet prints;147 × 57 cm each.
“These works are a portrait of a particular couple. They question the sustainability of desire in the long term through allegorically measuring or quantifying the comforts of intimacy, that is, its distance.”
Long Casting (A Page on Regret), 2019. Archival inkjet print; 83 × 57 cm.
“From an ongoing series of indexes for books, I have not yet written and probably never will. The indexes are an ongoing project that map the development of my interests, readings and preoccupations and thus becomes a form of self‑portraiture that unfolds over time.”
Figure With Shadow (Stage I-III), 2022. Archival ink‑jet prints; 91,6 × 61,6 cm each.
“Documentation of the performative process of self‑fashioning; a leap into a mimetic correspondence with different forms of fiction.”
Playing the Standards (As If it Were Isa Genzken) / (As If it Were Adrian Piper) / (As If it Were Cy Twombly), 2020. Archival ink‑jet prints; 33,5 × 42,5 cm each.
“Three from a series of five photographs that economically addresses the nature of influence, learning, repetition and difference. The cube is a formal subjectivation of an ideal, an aspiration as well as a point of departure (a standard, in the Jazz sense of the term). As is characteristic in my practice, the work challenges the contingencies of reading, translation and recontextualization.”
Untitled (Speaking in Tongues), 2022. Archival ink‑jet prints; 102 × 71 cm each.
“A collaged narrative that mediates on the relationships between mother tongue, bilingualism and the troubled ecosystem that this in‑betweeness sustains.”
Footnote #22, 2021. Vinyl text on wall; approx. 135 cm width.
“An ongoing series of wall drawings that treats the wall as a page and may or not accompany (inform) other works.”
About: Alejandro Cesarco was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1975. Lives and works in New York.Recent solo exhibitions include: Todo en negro, los ojos cerrados por el exceso del desastre, Fotogalería Teatro San Martín, Buenos Aires (2021); A Solo Exhibition, Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam (2019); Tactics & Technics, CAC, Vilnius (2019); Song, The Renaissance Society, Chicago (2017); The Measures of Memory, Galleria Raffaella Cortese, Milan (2017); Public Process, Sculpture Center, New York (2017); Prescribe the Symptom, Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis (2015); Secondary Revision, Frac Île‑de‑France/Le Plateau, Paris (2013); A Portrait, a Story, and an Ending, Kunsthalle Zürich (2013); Alejandro Cesarco, mumok, Vienna (2012); A Common Ground, Uruguayan Pavilion, 54th Venice Biennial (2011); One without the Other, Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City (2011); and Present Memory, Tate Modern, London (2010). These exhibitions addressed, through different formats and strategies, his recurrent interests in repetition, narrative, and the practices of reading and translating. Group exhibitions include: Closer, Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2022); INFORMATION Today, Kunsthalle Basel (2021); The Work of Mourning, Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm (2020); … of bread, wine, cars, security and peace, Kunsthalle Wien (2020); Affective Affinities, 33 Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil (2018); Question the Wall Itself, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2016); Under the Same Sun, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2014); Tell It to My Heart: Collected by Julie Ault, Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel (2013); and The Imminence of Poetics, 30th Bienal de São Paulo (2012). He has also curated exhibitions in the U.S., Uruguay, Argentina, and most recently, a section of the 33 Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil (2018) and ARCO, Madrid (2020). He is the director of the non profit arts organization, Art Resources Transfer.
Exhibition: The Ongoing Story. Alejandro Cesarco
Exhibition Duration: November 18, 2022 – February 9
Address and contact:
Galleria Raffaella Cortese
Via A. Stradella 7-1-4 Milano, Italy
www.raffaellacortese.com