Raffaella Cortese is pleased to present the gallery’s first solo exhibition with Alejandro Cesarco.

Alejandro Cesarco works in dialogue with the histories of Conceptual Art and addresses, through different mediums and strategies, his interest in repetition, narrative and the practices of reading and translation. On view at the gallery will be a series of photographs, texts, and a recent video that primarly investigate two lines of thought: the idea of art as a form of art history and the preoccupation with style in relation to ageing. At the center of this peculiar intersection lays the acknowledgement that if art has to do with the “unknown” – which is different from a banal preoccupation with novelty – then, a recognizable (repeatable) matured voice or style contradicts this very notion of discovery or surprise.

Musings (2013), a 16mm film transferred to video, retells a series of anecdotes regarding premonitions, fate, dreams, and other types of messages that are the generative source for creative work. Compiled are stories by or relating to, amongst others, Susan Sontag, Ingmar Bergman, Maurice Blanchot, Italo Calvino, Julio Cortázar, and Agnés Varda. Musings proposes to triangulate the ideas of inspiration, influence and inheritance. The Style it Takes (Excerpts 2014), are printed pages from a yet unwritten book that revolves around the possibilities of art, the social function of art, and the shifting roles of the artist. In the ongoing series, Pictures, Cesarco inverts the act of “reading” an image through its translation into language. Pictures are photographs of clippings, from magazines and journals, in which critics describe other people’s work. At the gallery, the artist has selected a number of works that directly reference painting. Also on view will be the photographic triptych A Portrait of the Artist Approaching Forty (2013) and the wall painting A Truce Mistaken for Surrender (2013).