Montevideo, Uruguay, 1975
Lives and works in Madrid, Spain
In his conceptually-oriented practice, Alejandro Cesarco employs translational and appropriational strategies involving telling and retelling, interpretation and misinterpretation, citation and mediation. Central to Cesarco’s work is an ongoing concern with the divergences and overlaps between looking and reading.
Cesarco’s primary mediums are text, photography, video and installation, as well publishing, curating and collaborative projects with other artists. Throughout, his work is characterized by its nuanced layering of absence and presence, its assured handling of caesurae and silences, its deft conflations of time and memory, and by its demonstration that the limits and limitations of language — any language, including non-verbal language — need not be endpoints but rather can serve as starting points for further language.
While rooted in art history and highly informed by literature and literary theory, Cesarco’s own work is at the same deeply personal, drawing on affairs of the heart and rendering them, with palpable tenderness into the public language of art. Economical of means, Cesarco’s work abundantly conveys how meaning, in art, is not only apprehended but is also felt, and how the past, artistically or otherwise, is in no way in opposition to the present nor the future.