Alfredo Aceto

Alfredo Aceto works at the frontiers on the vectors used to define a thing and an identity. Interested in the nature of the object, he explores its attributes in order to re-conceive it in some new form that expands its narrative possibilities. Reflections on the nature of the object and the capacity of human thought to grasp its meaning continue to enliven the international discussion as demonstrated by the success of OOO (Object Oriented Ontology) and the new materialisms that have spread throughout Europe and the United States in the last ten years.

Using among others sculpture, film and sound, Alfredo Aceto creates spaces suspended between fiction and reality. His environments are places to live, in which one can find a sort of melancholy, artificial time alteration and image saturation. The objects he produces are traces, functional elements for the construction of the space where the blurred boundaries between his personal timeline and the collective one express the way chronology can be manipulate. His work arises from the will to create a place where would mix together the various strata of a linear form of time, turning into a platform from which signs of different ages emerge. Developing his work in a creative path that passes through multiple and never truly resolved phases of growth, Alfredo Aceto nurtures his own research by questioning his own self and, more in general, the ego that reigns in every person, if only on a latent level. 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. That state of absence of any identifiable characters doesn’t mean there’s no one. The human presence can be tracked, but seems to escape. This manifests itself in Aceto’s gestures, which often have the particularity to be undetectable, his work reaching a state of quasi-readymades. As a whole, the practice is composed of works investigating withdrawal as queer strategy of display, architectural nonsense and sculptures-as-prosthetics. Some informations related to very specific and traumatic places could have been forgotten or even deleted by the brain. These flat voids of disappeared space represent a transformation of something that was initially reassuring and then perceived as repressing; determining a rich field for identifying an emancipatory ecosystem.

After obtaining a Bachelor in Visual Arts at ECAL (Ecole Cantonale d’Art de Lausanne), Alfredo Aceto has exhibited his work at Museo del 900 in Milan; Kunsthaus Glarus; the Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva; VFO, Verein für Originalgraphik in Zürich; the Sixty-Eight Art Institute in Copenhagen; DOC! in Paris; Villa Medici in Rome and Istituto Svizzero in Milan. In 2018 he was part of the Swiss Art Awards in Basel; in 2020 he is the recipient of the prestigious grant from the Fondation Leenaards. Alfredo Aceto will be fellow at Istituto Svizzero in Milan in 2020/2021.