In his novel The man without qualities (1930/42), Robert Musil wrote: “Unfortunately, nothing is more difficult to achieve than a literary representation of a thinking man”, because the result “no longer has the form of the thought process as e live it, but already only from what has been thought, which is unfortunately impersonal. Up to the task, the new video by Alejandro Cesarco Mid-career2023, the central work of the personal exhibition “Subtitled/subtitletakes the form of active thinking, rooted in language and not much else. A journey through mid-career purgatory, the video follows the artist’s alter ego as he looks back twenty years on himself, writing without the “determining weight of a previous trajectory”, trying to find the difference in the similarity imposed by the “style”, oscillating between recursion and the hope of meeting a point of punctuation.
Between otherness and identity, “Subtitled/subtitlestage the self as a place haunted by memories (documentary photography All my mother’s doors‘at home, 2022); artistic influence (the six false pages of the book The style you need [Excerpts], 2014); and the need to right past wrongs (Errata2020, a list of revisions that replaces the word privacy with fragility). The selection of works negotiates the relationship between style as a coded way of making the world and a subject initially without words or whose world is made of words and affect. To call “Subtitled/Subtitle“poetic” fails to understand its meaning. To say it’s “personal” is nothing but a platitude. On the contrary, to draw inspiration from Musil, the exhibition is a reflexive game between indeterminacy and coherence, capturing the affinities and (in)consistencies of things that come together in the head.
