Alejandro Cesarco, the art of looking at the word and listening to the image

Two of the rooms occupied by the solo show by Uruguayan artist Alejandro Cesarco (Montevideo, 1975), the first in one of our institutions, could seem almost empty. Some will think that It is a brief exhibition if only the pieces on the walls are considered. Three per room. Two works of printed words, two projections and two sets of photos. One of each pair in each room, as if the selection of words, still images and moving images were mirrored. In this controlled amplitude, a minimal gesture from the artist and curator, all that remains is to look at the word and listen to the image, with the necessary calm, time and space.

It is the result of a precision applied to things that do not exist, to texts, dialogues and spaces that can only be imagined: the bibliography of a book not written in Table of Contents (An Educator), 2023; the gaps between sentences in a text about bilingualism in Untitled (Speaking in Tongues)2022; the silent dreams of a new generation in figuratively, 2021; or the photos of all the thresholds in her mother's house and the floors with theater rehearsal marks.

The only voices we hear, in Portuguese, are those of psychoanalyst Suely Rolnik, heir to Guattari and rhizomatic thinking, in the Godard-inspired scene of a conversation between teacher and student. An encounter between ghosts, others and their memory… in the film's quote and in the image itself of a train that crosses Brazil like a ghost, since the railway system exists as an entelechy, a colonially domesticated landscape.

The proposal is to question precisely and radically the ways of learning reality

The third, or first, part, located before the passage to the galleries, includes the artist's editorial work: his own and edited works in relation to other reference texts. Under the name of concentric circles we found a constellation of books and photocopied books that contextualize Cesarco's influences and ways of doing things –Lawrence Weiner, Fischli and Weiss, Chantal Akerman, Maria Eichhorn or María Gainza–.

The crowded tables become a real meeting place, a meeting place. Cross-referencing their correspondence with those of our memories, as the note on the wall says: “The theme of this chapter is memory; the last words were (…) [que nada de lo que se haya oído pueda volverse a conta con las mas palabras]”.

Thus, amidst the confusion between beginning and end, original, copy and citation, there are “other recent examples” in the form of works to which the exhibition title alludes. Between the buzz that the shared reading room can cause and the ample silence of the expository part, the proposal, here and throughout Cesarco's career, is to question in a precise and radical way the ways of learning about reality and languages with which we share. .

A thought as an enlightened critical consciousness (quoting Marina Garcés) about how we learn at school and construct history in a polyglot, textual and visual way, with its assumptions, misunderstandings and absences.

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