Where satellites go to die. Possible Worlds, Transitions and Melancholies in the Work of Alfredo Aceto by Vincenzo di Rosa

Aceto also expropriates stories that have already been written, or rather elements, traces, and scenarios from historical events and previously thought-up invented worlds.¹ In 2014, he went back to an episode described by Walter Benjamin in his last text, On the Concept of History (1942): during the July Revolution of 1830, in a desecrating symbolic gesture, as though wishing to demolish the continuity of time, the Parisian revolutionaries, “independently and simultaneously”, fired their guns at the clocks in the bell towers. The artist brings Benjamin’s anecdote back to life by presenting a series of Alessi clocks designed by Aldo Rossi in 1993 – the Moment model – pierced in different places, as if repeatedly shot at. In 2016, on the other hand, after several listening sessions, he made a work entitled Modesty or Surprise, in which he recreated the roar of Godzilla and made it resound among the marble statues in the Museo Pietro Canonica a Villa Borghese. The soundtrack of Spielberg’s film thus erupts onto the early-twentieth-century sculptures, and onto the battles and Christian scenes, ushering in a visionary dialogue in which all sense of time is overturned and the absurdity of the connection takes centre stage. What relationships are formed by the artist’s fictional universes and the works he creates? How do these two moments of creation interact? Entering Aceto’s work means finding one’s way through unstable, floating dramas that, on each occasion, give meaning and shape to the objects they take in. In his latest projects, he extends, or rather expands this approach into the space-time of the exhibition. He thinks of the exhibition as the place where he can test the hypothesis of a “correction of the world”. A correction entirely played out on a shift in his artistic language, reaching from the level of allegorical representation to that of metonymic presentation. Allegory “is always the escape and mysticism of meaning”, as Achille Bonito Oliva wrote about the work of Gino De Dominicis, “and thus a distancing from the physical in favour of a theatricality that ensures the spectator can find the reassuring essence of two levels: the fiction of art and the reality of life”.² In the metonymic presentation, on the other hand, these two levels become unrecognisable as they mix together and the elements in play combine to acquire form, in light of their coexistence in reality.

What is more, Aceto’s solo exhibitions always look like group exhibitions. This is not just because he often includes works by other artists, but also because he includes works or stories that he has already worked on at different times in his career.³ In Kevin (2020), his latest exhibition project, created for the spaces of the Kunst Raum Riehen in Basel, he goes back to and expands a series of photographs entitled Fabian Marti (2009-2020), which he started in 2009.⁴ The work – created using a method already tested in the projects involving Sophie Calle and the city of Pripyat – revolves around a Swiss artist, Fabian Marti, with whom Aceto has had only a few brief conversations and whose work he has never really examined. Interpreted as a “stereotype of himself”, along the lines of the concept of what is “standard” as developed by Emilio Prini, Marti is “translated” into images that appear from a series of searches carried out on Google. In the first version of the work, Aceto focuses mainly on the artist’s face, which seems to capture the essence of his role to perfection, with his unkempt beard and long hair. In the second, he shows a sequence of images that are “probably” linked to his works, or to those of other artists he has exhibited with, or possibly simply indexed by the search engine for reasons we cannot fathom. We see a pair of leather moccasins, a horse’s head emerging from rocky mountains, the number eight, the installation view of an exhibition and the shells of mussels that appear to bloom from a concrete pedestal. The Fabian Marti series of photographs reveals some key aspects of Aceto’s artistic and exhibition processes. This is because it is grafted onto a form of “denotative thinning” that involves two work methods that are absolutely key to the artist’s work. The first is one that concerns the “imperfect correspondences “ between the stories he uses and the works he then goes on to create: with the exception of The Thinker – which in any case he enlarges – Aceto’s objects do not seem to perfectly fit the stories that gave rise to them. It is as if they came to an agreement based on a mismatch, on a principle of missed shifting: the actual links between the two moments of generation are often imperceptible, and rarely detectable. Take, for example, Sequoia 07 , the exhibition put on at the Swiss Institute in Milan in February 2019. To create this work, the artist recalled a childhood memory, a story he was told by his grandmother: “the story of some young people escorted through a tunnel of trees by a woman on a white horse, in a 2007 Toyota Sequoia, his favourite car”. And yet, the sculptural landscape we find ourselves looking at hardly seems to reflect this idea. Rather, it seems to turn it into a series of sculptural modules and drawings that suggest only a few fragments of it.

Even though they may appear cryptic, obscure and self-sufficient, these two operations do not have the syntactic autonomy that is typically found in a certain conceptualist approach. Rather, they appear as the materialisation of a narrative fabric that exposes the artistic object to the effects of time, including it within an open constellation of transition. It is in this area of tension that much of Aceto’s work takes shape. It is on this borderline, on this potential loss of control – on the cracks and fissures caused by the “mismatches” and “forced cohabitations” – that the original phenomenon of transition comes about. As Mario Perniola wrote, the process “goes from the same to the same”, asserting the “difference of every reality with respect to itself, the flourishing of its virtuality and of its evolution and metamorphosis.”⁵ The artist’s exhibitions thus allow for a shifted experience of the object, which comes about in a place that is not that of everyday life, for it is fully open to a world of the imagination that is not fully attributable to the encounter with the work.

As a result, while in “minimalist” solutions, these works might seem to “shift the origin of the meaning of the work to the outside”,⁶ since they aim to define a space in phenomenological terms, they also describe a movement that turns inward, into its own fabric, affirming the autonomy of its own difference by virtue of the “possible worlds” that accompany them. Aceto takes objects back into their deepest secrets and, at the same time, he exposes them to the perils of space and time. Together with other objects. And other stories.

Finally, he makes them feel like unattainable goals, inaccessible and uninhabitable places. Not hospitable. Almost melancholy. Like those images that, every now and then, come out during his interviews: “a missing car that climbs a cliff on a sunny day”, “winter mornings in Lausanne when I felt I was the only one left in Pripyat a year after the nuclear explosion”, “motorways with vast abandoned public housing units looking out over them, alternating with gigantic monuments”.⁷