Endemisms (065)

Andersen's is pleased to present the gallery's first solo exhibition of the Swiss based, Italian artist Alfredo Aceto.  Employing sculpture, film and sound, Alfredo Aceto creates spaces suspended between fiction and reality. Aceto's immersive environments are places to live, in which one finds a sort of melancholy, artificial time alteration and image saturation. As described by Cedric Fauq in his recent essay The Knight, the Alien, the Alliance (A guide for time travel), “the timeline – more than time itself – is precisely Alfredo Aceto’s primary obsession. Concerned with the way stories are narrated, his exhibitions are always finding a way to tell a story without telling one. The first missing element being characters. The human is never present in the artist’s work, but always suggested.” For Aceto, the objects he produces are traces -- blurred boundaries between his personal timeline and the collective one. His work arises from the will to create a place in which the various strata of a linear form of time are mixed, turning into a platform from which signs of different ages emerge.
In his exhibition at Andersen’s, Alfredo Aceto uses sculptures, furniture pieces, a video and a series of watercolours to re-interpret Steven Spielberg’s Duel (1971) which was shot during the early years of the car-chase in cinema. Like the chase in Duel, Endemisms can be read as a journey, and the exhibition is place to be alone or with others along the way. The exhibition opens in an ambiguous space -- a black desk made by design factory TECNO in the 1970’s has been covered with partridge feathers. It is neither a painting nor furniture. The desk begins the journey, and is present again in the video in the next room. Watercolors in each room hark back to some of Aceto’s pictorial gestures he has repeated for years. The show has been advertised with Edward Hopper’s watercolour “Jo In Wyoming”.
By using the Hopper image, Aceto shows both the deconstruction of the structure of his watercolours. The sculptures are objects of this world, but exist in multiple realms. Like sculptures one might see in a passing glimpse from a train, leaving a trace of an image on one’s memory, Aceto’s sculptures allude to the anonymous and its contrary. The works are thus given a utopian and ornamental function, but also exalt the pieces ambiguous position as an art piece. The shapes come from a more mechanical world, but also allude to archeological artifacts or to random urban sculptures. In the first television version of Duel from Spielberg the truck is personified thanks to the roar of Godzilla. In Endemisms, the roar of Godzilla, meticulously recreated by the artist during the last two years, personifies the TECNO desk, seen multiple times throughout the video piece. Covering the desk in the same grease and tar Spielberg used to cover the truck during filming, Aceto uses the desk as a guidepost along the viewer’s journey. However, unlike the truck in Duel, the desk in Endemisms is tarred and feathered, perhaps reminding us of a fictional monster.