Alfredo Aceto's sculptures that play with our timelines

He fishes from the pop and surrealist repertoire, the young artist Alfredo Aceto (Turin, 1991), a Piedmontese who has lived and worked in Lausanne since 2017, where he undertook his studies at the local École Cantonale d’Art, training with Philippe Decrauzat and Valentin Carron. Aceto expresses himself through sculptures and installations (but often without disdaining film and sound) looking now playful now bizarre, somewhere between reality and fiction. “The timeline, more than time itself, is Alfredo Aceto’s main obsession,” wrote critic Cedric Fauq. “Interested in the way stories are told, his exhibitions always find ways to tell a story without telling it. And the first element missing is precisely the characters. The human figure is never present in the artist’s work, but is always suggested.”

For Alfredo Aceto, objects are the traces that mark a boundary between his personal timeline and the collective one. His goal is to create a place where everyone’s timelines intermingle to find different possible narratives, through associations of ideas, mixing of different languages, artificial alterations.

“Often,” the artist said in a 2015 interview for Flash Art with Andrea Bellini, director of the Centre d’Art Contemporanin in Geneva, “I make choices that allow me to play with, reverse and overturn the order of events in time by interrupting the chronology of the ’phases of life.’ It is a way to continue to be aware in a world where boundaries are increasingly blurred and where children immediately become adults while adults remain children longer and longer.”

Perhaps also because of the nature of his research, his work, despite Alfredo Aceto’s young age, has already gone through several stages, some very distant from each other. Underlying everything, however, seems to be the elusive character of objects and art in general (this is also probably why his works never have a definite form: an indeterminacy very consistent with the philosophical basis of his research).

“What may appear as an obsessive game,” reads the presentation of his Sequoia 07 exhibition held in 2019 at the Swiss Institute in Milan, “is rather Aceto’s desire to search for the lowest common denominator for which an object can be a sculpture. While he carefully chooses the objects of his interest and treats them with care and reproduces them, he also erases and suppresses their qualities by stripping them of all meaning. Anti-heroic by definition, these objects remind us how evanescent details are; we love them but are saddened by their transitory state. Each sculpture resembles what is quickly glimpsed through the window of a train: something extremely fast but very precise.”

Aceto has already taken his works to important contexts: he has participated in group shows in half of Europe, and his works have been exhibited at Artissima and Art Basel. Today the artist is represented by the galleries Dittrich & Schlechtriem (Berlin), Andersen’s Contemporary (Copenhagen) and Levy.Delval (Brussels).

Alfredo Aceto, Juste un Clou Rouge (2019; polystyrene, fiberglass, resin, painting, 105 cm diameter)

Alfredo Aceto, Laughing Window II (2019; acrylic, cotton, foam rubber and synthetic material, 150 x 180 x 5 cm)

Alfredo Aceto, Gutter-Hydrant II (2019; polystyrene, fiberglass, resin, and paint, 80 x 58 x 23 cm)

Alfredo Aceto, Olive Sea Snake Digesting a Watermelon (2019; polystyrene, vetr fiber, resin, painting, and iron, 125 x 125 x 65 cm)

Alfredo Aceto, Echinoidea (2018; polystyrene, vetr fiber, resin, painting, and iron, 125 x 125 x 70 cm)

Alfredo Aceto, Untitled (2017; watercolor on paper, 30 x 40 cm)

Alfredo Aceto's sculptures that play with our timelines

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