Alex Da Corte

For his first major solo exhibition in Europe, Alex Da Corte has created a new work for the Vienna Secession. With his immersive installation, Slow Graffiti, the artist turns the 6,500 square feet iconic gallery space into a kind of fractured cityscape full of dysfunctional objects. His skeleton of a neon city shifts the white cube of the Secession into a hazy twilight. It carries the wrinkles of a life lived, the ghosts of human presence. To quote Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray, “Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man’s face. It cannot be concealed.” Velvet-clad walls and a patchwork carpet that covers the floor with its template pattern give the setting a soft touch. Various objects and sculptures assembled in Doctor Frankenstein’s spirit are scattered on the floor. Set in a quiet sitting area, a video is screened every 20 minutes: a shot-for-shot remake of Jørgen Leth’s The Perfect Human. Slow Graffiti, Da Corte’s interpretation of this film features the artist masked as Boris Karloff and Frankenstein’s monster to a score by Devonté Hynes. Slow Graffiti radiates softness, vulnerability, mutability, and transience — like the verve of an invisible city, one that exists only in someone’s imagination but that takes shape here. Against the backdrop of today’s accelerated digital world, the exercised care and communal spirit of making can be considered a radical act of transgression.