ALEJANDRO CESARCO: Loyalties and Betrayals

28 February – 11 April 2015

  • Words with Ruscha , 2014 2 archival inkjet prints 50 x 38 in. / 127 x 96.5 cm each

  • Untitled (Remembered) , 2014 Archival inkjet print 24 x 31 1/2 in. / 61 x 80 cm

  • Portrait of the Artist Approaching Forty (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”. , 2013 Color photograph 7 x 5 in. / 18 x 13 cm

  • Portrait of the Artist Approaching Forty (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.” , 2013 Color photograph 7 x 5 in. / 18 x 13 cm

  • Portrait of the Artist Approaching Forty (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.” (From the first paragraph of F. Scott Fitzgerald's story "The Crack-Up") , 2013 Color photograph 7 x 5 in. / 18 x 13 cm

  • Allegory, or, The Perils of the Present Tense , 2015 16mm film transferred to digital, color, silent 9:30 minutes

  • Allegory, or, The Perils of the Present Tense , 2015 16mm film transferred to digital, color, silent 9:30 minutes

  • Allegory, or, The Perils of the Present Tense , 2015 16mm film transferred to digital, color, silent 9:30 minutes

  • Allegory, or, The Perils of the Present Tense , 2015 16mm film transferred to digital, color, silent 9:30 minutes

  • Allegory, or, The Perils of the Present Tense , 2015 16mm film transferred to digital, color, silent 9:30 minutes

  • Mirrored Portrait , 2015 16mm film transferred to digital, color, silent 3:50 minutes

  • Mirrored Portrait , 2015 16mm film transferred to digital, color, silent 3:50 minutes

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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.”

Wall treatments in collaboration with Martin Beck.

Alejandro Cesarco (b. 1975 Montevideo, Uruguay) lives and works in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include: Secondary Revision, Frac Île-de-France/Le Plateau, Paris (2013), A Portrait, A Story, And An Ending, Kunsthalle Zürich, Switzerland (2013), Alejandro Cesarco, MuMOK, Vienna (2012). Group exhibitions include: Under The Same Sun, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2014), Tell It To My Heart: Collected by Julie Ault, Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel (2013), The Imminence of Poetics, 30th Bienal de São Paulo (2012). In 2011 he was the recipient of the Baloise Art Prize at Art 42 Basel with his installation The Streets Were Dark With Something More Than Night Or The Closer I Get To The End The More I Rewrite The Beginning. Cesarco is director of the non-profit arts organization, Art Resources Transfer.

His solo exhibition, Prescribe the Symptom, opens at Midway, Minneapolis on March 6 and runs through April 18, 2015.

For more information or images, please contact the gallery at +1-212-463-7372 or info@murrayguy.com