Alejandro Cesarco “Loyalties and Betrayals”

Murray Guy

poster for Alejandro Cesarco “Loyalties and Betrayals”

This event has ended.

Loyalties and Betrayals flirts with the possibilities of memory as both the object and instrument of our desires. The exhibition puts in relation ideas of personal narrative, surface and silence, style and aging, influence and inheritance, and includes the following works:

Allegory, or, The Perils of the Present Tense, 2015, 16mm film transferred to digital, color, silent, 9:30 minutes. Cesarco’s most recent video is composed of a fragmented text, appearing as inter-titles, interspersed with snapshot-like images of memories. Throughout the work conjectures about the past are balanced against promises of the future. By talking about the past the artist is also talking about his wants or desires. In this sense, talking about the past becomes a way of talking about the future; of fashioning a future.

Mirrored Portrait, 2015, 16mm film transferred to digital, color, silent, 3:50 minutes. After sixteen years of not seeing each other Cesarco invited his first photo-graphy teacher, Panta Astiazarán, to take his portrait while Cesarco, in turn, would film a portrait of him. Mirrored Portrait is the documentation of this action. The work aligns itself with Cesarco’s previous explor-ations of autobiography and representations of “father figures”: particularly, Zeide Isaac (2009) and Present Memory (2010).

Words With Ruscha, 2014, two framed ink-jet prints, 50 x 40 inches (127 x 100 cm) each.Two photographs with differing perspective of the same museum-like introductory wall text for a fictitious Ed Ruscha retro-spective based chiefly around ideas of banality and boredom.

Untitled (Remembered), 2014, framed ink-jet print, 24 x 31.5 inches (61 x 80 cm). Perhaps the domestic equivalent of Words With Ruscha, Untitled (Remembered) presents a text on methodologies and typologies of remembering among piles of books and a wide range of ephemera that range from a vintage postcard of a statue of Mercury in repose to a still of Monica Vitti in L’ avventura.

A Portrait of the Artist Approaching Forty (I-III), 2013, Three framed ink-jet prints, 5 x 7 inches (13 x 18 cm) each. I. Walking the Studio or “Of course life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work–the sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from the outside–the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once.” II. Pacing the Studio or “There is another sort of blow that comes from within - that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again.” III. Mapping the Studio or “The first sort of breakage seems to happen quick – the second kind happens almost without your knowing it but is realized suddenly indeed.”

Media

Schedule

from February 28, 2015 to April 04, 2015

Opening Reception on 2015-02-28 from 18:00 to 20:00

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