Galleria Raffaella Cortese is delighted to present The Ongoing Story, Alejandro Cesarco’s third solo show with the gallery. In the artist’s own words: “The exhibition is a selection of recent works that explore the emotional contours of life during increasingly precarious times. The works provide an affective framework for felt experience and circle, in various ways, around an identity built in relation to someone else’s. The works included, which are mostly photographic, address among other things the pain of estrangement, the embarrassment of memory, the panic of oblivion, and the fragility of intimacy.”

Staged in all three gallery spaces, The Ongoing Story is comprised of recent text‑based works, photographs, and a vinyl wall text, all yielding from Alejandro Cesarco’s multifarious practice. He describes the works included as such:

Down & Across (I & II), 2020. Archival ink-jet prints; 119 × 82,5 cm each.
“A series of drawings made during the first months of Covid-19 lockdown which document, through color and received clues, a period of apparent suspended meaning.”

Errata, 2020. Archival ink-jet print; 57 × 40 cm.
“An acknowledgement of past mistakes, a way of saying “I’m sorry”.”

An Angry Silence, 2022. Paint on wall; dimensions variable.
“A new wall drawing in line with previous forms of “muted melodrama”. In this case a visual equivalent of the consequences of hiding things under the rug.”

The Long Term (A Measure of Intimacy I, II, IV), 2020. Archival ink-jet prints; 142 × 55 cm each.
“These works are a portrait of a particular couple. They question the sustainability of desire in the long term through allegorically measuring or quantifying the comforts of intimacy, that is, its distance.”

Long Casting (A Page on Regret), 2019. Archival ink-jet print; 83 × 57 cm.
“From an ongoing series of indexes for books I have not yet written and most probably never will. The indexes are an ongoing project that map the development of my interests, readings and preoccupations and thus become a form of self-portraiture that unfolds over time.”

Figure With Shadow (Stage I-III), 2022. Archival ink-jet prints; 90 × 60 cm each.
“Documentation of the performative process of self-fashioning; a leap into a mimetic correspondence with different forms of fiction.”

Playing the Standards (As If it Were Isa Genzken) / (As If it Were Adrian Piper) / (As If it Were Cy Twombly), 2020. Archival ink-jet prints; 26 × 35 cm each.
“Three from a series of five photographs that economically addresses the nature of influence, learning, repetition and difference. The cube is a formal subjectivation of an ideal, an aspiration as well as a point of departure (a standard, in the Jazz sense of the term). As is characteristic in my practice, the work challenges the contingencies of reading, translation and recontextualization.”

Untitled (Speaking in Tongues), 2022. Archival ink-jet prints; 102 × 71 cm each.
“A collaged narrative that mediates on the relationships between mother tongue, bilingualism and the troubled ecosystem that this in-betweeness sustains.”

Footnote #22, 2021. Vinyl text on wall; approx. 135 cm width.
“An ongoing series of wall drawings that treats the wall as a page and may or not accompany (inform) other works.”