Alejandro Cesarco

The artist Alejandro Cesarco, who was born in 1975 in Montevideo, Uruguay and has

been living in New York since 1998, will be showing three of his most recent works

starting on 22 September 2012: the installation The streets were dark with

something more than night or the closer I get to the end the more I rewrite the

beginning (2011), the video, Methodology (2011), and a supplementary photo work

plus a collage, Four Modes of Experiencing Regret (2012), specially created for the

mumok. After much-acclaimed solo presentations in, amongst others, New York,

Venice and Basel (Baloise Art Prize 2011) the exhibition Alejandro Cesarco will allow

insight into his linguistically-oriented praxis.

What is the relationship between words and images, between the ‘sayable’ and the

visible’ How do readers recognise, or invent, the meaning of a story’ How do

memory and history, fact and fiction, interlock’ Alejandro Cesarco devotes himself to these questions in his art works which make references to the legacy of international conceptual art: he makes linkages with language and literature-based designs by artists such as John Baldessari, Marcel Broodthaers and Lawrence Weiner but also with works by Félix González-Torres and Louise Lawler. His textual works, photographs, collages, films, artist books and installations all contain

autobiographical as well as literary references. They reflect on the possibilities of

making and translating historical references. During this process the emotional

dynamics of interpersonal relationships is of special importance to him.

In 2011 Alejandro Cesarco was awarded the Baloise Art Prize. In his prize-winning

installation, The streets were dark with something more than night or the closer I get

to the end the more I rewrite the beginning (2011), he engaged with the literary

genre of the detective story. In the installation, which consists of wall texts, a slide

show, photographs and a booklet, visitors experience themselves as being private

investigators in search of a narrative with order and meaning.

The seven-minute video, Methodology, (2011), is supplemented by photographs and

concerned with the narrative structures arising from a secret in the form of the

intimate conversation between two protagonists. The work, first presented to the

public at the 54th Venice Biennale in the Uruguayan pavilion, pursues the question of

what can be said in a relationship and what might be better left unsaid. The third

work, Four Modes of Experiencing Regret (2012) which was specially made for the

mumok, uses the connection between images and language as well as a pseudoscientific depiction to produce an intentionally contradictory classification of the feelings of remorse and regret.