ALFREDO ACETO / Endemisms
March 10 - April 15, 2017
Andersen's
Bredgade 28, Copenhagen
http://www.andersenscontemporary.dk/
March 10 - April 15, 2017
Andersen's
Bredgade 28, Copenhagen
http://www.andersenscontemporary.dk/
Andersen's
is pleased to present the gallery's first solo exhibition of the Swiss based,
Italian artist Alfredo Aceto. The exhibition will be shown in both Andersen’s
Amaliegade and Bredgade locations and will be on view from March 10-April 15,
2017.
Employing
sculpture, film and sound, Alfredo Aceto creates spaces suspended between
fiction and reality. Aceto's immersive environments are places to live, in
which one finds a sort of melancholy, artificial time alteration and image
saturation. As described by Cedric Fauq in his recent essay The Knight, the
Alien, the Alliance (A guide for time-travel),
“the timeline – more than time itself – is precisely Alfredo Aceto’s primary
obsession. Concerned with the way stories are narrated, his exhibitions are
always finding a way to tell a story without telling one. The first missing
element being characters. The human is never present in the artist’s work, but
always suggested.”
For
Aceto, the objects he produces are traces -- blurred boundaries between his
personal timeline and the collective one. His work arises from the will to
create a place in which the various strata of a linear form of time are mixed,
turning into a platform from which signs of different ages emerge.
In his
exhibition at Andersen’s, Alfredo Aceto uses sculptures, furniture pieces, a
video and a seriesofwatercolourstore- interpretStevenSpielberg’s Duel(1971)whichwasshotduringthe
early years of the car-chase in
cinema. L ike the chase in D uel,
Endemisms can be read as a journey, and the exhibition is place to be
alone or with others along the way.
The
exhibition opens in an ambiguous space -- a black desk made by design factory
TECNO in the 1970’s has been covered with partridge feathers. It is neither a
painting nor furniture. The desk begins the journey, and is present again in
the video in the next room.
Watercolors
in each room hark back to some of Aceto’s pictorial gestures he has repeated
for years. The show has been advertised with Edward Hopper’s watercolour “Jo In
Wyoming”. By using the Hopper image, Aceto shows both the deconstruction of the
structure of his watercolours.
The
sculptures are objects of this world, but exist in multiple realms. Like
sculptures one might see in a passing glimpse from a train, leaving a trace of
an image on one’s memory, Aceto’s sculptures allude to the anonymous and its
contrary. The works are thus given a utopian and ornamental function, but also
exalt the pieces ambiguous position as an art piece. The shapes come from a
more mechanical world, but also allude to archeological artifacts or to random
urban sculptures.
In the
first television version of Duel from Spielberg the truck is personified
thanks to the roar of Godzilla. In Endemisms, the roar of Godzilla,
meticulously recreated by the artist during the last two years, personifies the
TECNO desk, seen multiple times throughout the video piece. Covering the desk
in the same grease and tar Spielberg used to cover the truck during filming,
Aceto uses the desk as a guidepost along the viewer’s journey. However, unlike
the truck in Duel, the desk in Endemisms is tarred and feathered,
perhaps reminding us of a fictional monster.
Alfredo
Aceto (b. 1991) studied at ECAL in Lausanne and MSA^, Mountain School in
Los Angeles. In 2015 he was the recipient of Kiefer Hablitzel Prize in
(Basel,CH). His work has been shown in institutions such as Centre d’Art
Contemporain (Geneva, CH), Kunsthaus Glarus (Glarus, CH), Museo del 900 (Milan,
Italy). He is a Professor at ECAL and lives and works in Geneva, Switzerland.
.......................................................................................
Alfredo
Aceto
The
Knight, the Alien, the Alliance (A guide for time-travel)
Cédric
Fauq
February
2017
There’s a
kind of child who doesn’t get so easily satisfied by the stories that are given
to them. Alfredo Aceto must have been one of them. And trying to imagine what
his relationship to classic childhood narrative was is not that uncanny, since
most of his gestures take that stage of his life as a point of departure. More
precisely, they exploit particular details that became, with time, obsessions:
we’re talking about Sophie Calle, Pripyat, Whales, Godzilla, or cars (and
specifically some models). Those are the components of a cosmology that the
artist is permanently reconfiguring for every project, building up a world full
of symbols and events, where the timeline is unclear – meaning non-linear.
The
timeline – more than time itself – is precisely Alfredo Aceto’s primary
obsession. Concerned with the way stories are narrated, his exhibitions are
always finding a way to tell a story without telling one. The first missing
element being characters. The human is never present in the artist’s work, but
always suggested. That state of absence of any identifiable characters doesn’t
mean there’s no one. Like Pripyat-the-now-ghost-town, his works are full of
traces. The human presence can be tracked, but seems to escape. This manifests
itself in Aceto’s gestures, which often have the particularity to be
undetectable, his work reaching a state of quasi-readymades (if reaching
is the right word?).
This was
already the case for most of of his early works. Take the clocks series, pieces
that are made out of a wall clock which is not running. Their heavy shiny
frames show the impact of bullets whose origin is unclear: is the artist
responsible for the shots? The story surrounding them wants us to believe
something else. The artist recalls, talking about them, that passage of Walter
Benjamin’s On the concept of history (1940), recounting the French
Revolution:
« During
the evening of the first skirmishes, it turned out that the clock-towers were
shot at independently and simultaneously in several places in Paris. »
Harking
back to this anecdote, Alfredo Aceto replaces the work in another time-frame.
However, the temporal tensions are pushed to their extreme: the clocks used for
this series also have a story – they are Aldo Rossi’s clocks, and, more
precisely, the enlargement of the original « Momento » design Aldo Rossi
created for the first Alessi’s wristwatch. The clash between the product, the
history of this very product, and the violent intervention arising from a
historical event blurs the lines between the author, the maker and the artist.
Even in
the pictures Alfredo Aceto produces, his intervention can be questioned.
Subverting the classic idea of style, the artist often borrows codes to
different genres to draw and paint. The comic for Alfredo was a little boy,
Sophie was a charming woman, Paola performed an act of magic, 2013, t he
engravings for his Re-Mental Landscapes, 2016, and, for his last series
of drawings ( Untitled, 2017), the technical drawing and
the amateurish landscape watercolor painting–a sdepictedinEdwardHopper’sJ oinWyoming(1946).
Deliberately
avoiding any essentialisation of his work, Aceto’s solo exhibitions often give
the feeling to be group exhibitions. The inclusion of works he’s made as a
child offer a counter-point to his most recent productions, creating, again, a
temporal distortion in his own biography, while making the bridge between
different narratives – the ones he used to believe in, the ones he still wants
to believe in, and the ones he’s trying to make the witness of his works create
by themselves. These layers of stories belonging to the life of the artist
overlap with already written histories, giving birth to an unresolved
mythology.
Coming
back to his solo-show at Bugada & Cargnel: E veryone
Stands Alone at the Heart of the World,P iercedbyaRayofSunlight,andSuddenlyIt’sEvening,whosetitle,athree-verses
poem by Salvatore Quasimodo, could be read as a tale, a statement and a
protocol for the exhibition, it is interesting to underline the presence of
different portals – both temporal and geographical. The first one ( S.L.A.V.1,
2015), a theatre backdrop style painting, represents the entrance of the
gallery in Torino where the artist had his first solo-show. The second, ( Loyal
Sauce B.C. - Noisy Whitish A.D., 2016), a large semi-opaque
PVC strip curtain, marks the passage between two temporalities (and more), as
suggested by the title, but also two places (and more).
Ononesideofthisportalisstanding(alone)T heThinker(2016),theenlargedreproductionofa
statue from the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture (c. 5200 to 3500 BC – Eastern
Europe) which Alfredo Aceto discovered during his quest of Prypiat’s past. On
the other side lies down the replica of an horizontal window belonging to Sara
Winchester’s house, also known as the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose,
California, whose story itself is a modern myth (1881 – 1922). The dialogue
that exists between these two works, made stronger by the portal that separates
them, can only be resolved through an epic mental time travel – weaving the
elements of the show as a detective would do.
But what
matters in Aceto’s practice is not the solution. The jump in between times and
places which would appear, in the first place, impermeable, is what profoundly
interests him. It is about disrupting the timelines and geographies that help
us read the past and pave the way for a future, thus providing us with new
ghosts, new aliens, and new knights, breaking the boundaries of a current
epistemological endemism. Modesty or Surprise (2016), produced at the
occasion of an exhibition at Museo Pietro Canonica in Rome, represents another
attempt by the artist to travel through times. Obsessed by the roar of Godzilla
since his childhood, Aceto recently had the desire to re-create the sound by
himself. Among the sculptures of the museum depicting christian scenes or
renown soldiers, the sound of the fictional monster resonates to the bones of
the bronzes and marbles.
For his
latest project to date, Endemisms, Alfredo Aceto is, through urban
sculptures, furniture pieces, a video and a series of watercolours,
re-interpreting Steven Spielberg’s Duel (1971), which was shot during
the early years of the car-chase in cinema. For the first time, the artist is
using moving image to build his « to be continued » epic and boundless
mythology.
Cédric
Fauq
February
2017