ART CITIES:Paris-Alejandro Cesarco

Alejandro Cesarco’s work is influenced by literature and literary theory, and by the fragile relationships that exist between imagery, language, and meaning. In addition to his studio practice, the artist has curated several exhibitions and runs Art Resources Transfer (A.R.T.), a nonprofit organization founded in 1987 to document conversations between artists.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Jeu de Paume Archive

Alejandro Cesarco presents “Learning the Language (Present Continuous I)”, a video portrait of the nonagenarian Argentine pianist Margarita Fernández.  For Cesarco, it is a continuation of his research into narrative structures and translation. Here he focuses on twists and turns and possible transpositions – from music to film, from film to music, and so on. Language has become a matter of motifs, resurgences and combinations, structured like a musical ensemble. His work unfolds as a series of deductions that often indicate an elsewhere or an off-camera, bearing witness to the experience of reality in all its discontinuity. Alejandro Cesarco describes his practice as addressing questions of “repetition, narrative, and the practices of reading and translating.” Artworks take the form of film and video, prints and photographs, text and drawings, among others, and evince a deep engagement with the histories and aesthetics of Conceptual Art. With a poetic, sometimes romantic, other times melancholic air, they represent a sustained investigation into time, memory, and how meaning is felt. Cesarco in projects such as “Index” (2008– ), a series of printed alphabetic lists of references assigned to nonexistent books, words are a central medium. For “Flowers” (2003), Cesarco sent bouquets to a group of iconic woman artists including Vija Celmins and Yoko Ono; each was accompanied by a card with the text, “This sculpture by Alejandro Cesarco was sponsored by Socrates Sculpture Park” (the project having been realized as part of the EAF02: 2002 Emerging Artist Fellowship Exhibition at the Queens, New York-based not-for-profit arts organization). The text’s quasi-official tone, the work’s dependence on circulation, and the fleeting nature of the object involved evoke prototypical Conceptual art. Yet Flowers’s statement is more poetic and arguably political, than didactic. Cesarco’s work avoids dogma precisely because it explores the tension between language and signification. At the Uruguayan Pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennale, he presented a video titled “Methodology” (2011), in which a couple argues entirely in commentaries derived from “Los adioses” (1954), a short novel about secrecy by Uruguayan author Juan Carlos Onetti. The simultaneous displacement and equivalence between the text and its performance emphasize the impossibility of transparent communication. Another aspect of Cesarco’s engagement with narrative and memory is revealed in his use of archival material. For his exhibition “One Without the Other: Travel Photography and Films of Rufino Tamayo” at the Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City in 2011, Cesarco and curator Juan Carlos Pereda, the leading authority on Tamayo’s work, showed photographs and films of trips made by the Mexican artist and museum founder. Accompanied by written descriptions of Tamayo’s paintings, the display confronted the viewer with the contrast between image and text, calling into question the veracity of both and highlighting the constructed nature of reminiscence.

Info: Curator: Agnès Violeau, Jeu de Paume, 1 place de la Concorde, Paris, Duration: 16/10/2018-27/1/19, Days & Hours: Tue-11:00-21:00, Wes-Sun 11:00-19:00, www.jeudepaume.org