Alfredo Aceto at CIRCUIT Centre d’art contemporain

Artist: Alfredo Aceto

Exhibition title: Full Moon Sergio

Venue: CIRCUIT Centre d’art contemporain, Lausanne, Switzerland

Date: June 1 – July 27, 2024

Photography: ©Julien Gremaud / courtesy the artist and CIRCUIT Centre d’art contemporain, Lausanne

Note: Exhibition text is available here

Alfredo Aceto’s exhibition Full Moon Sergio at CIRCUIT confronts narratives. For example, the customs of the Neolithic civilisation of the Cucuteni-Trypillia are set against the myth of the super-entrepreneur embodied by Sergio Marcionne. Sergio was an Italian-Canadian businessman living in Switzerland. He is best known for having led the Fiat Chrysler Automobiles merger. Alfredo Aceto shows an ambiguous interest in the figure of the businessman, summoned up in the title of the exhibition Full Moon Sergio, sounding like an invocation.

The work Last Cigarette Before I Go is greeting visitors in the entrance of CIRCUIT. It involves a combination of two gestures: the washing and the removal of pullover sleeves. The pullovers are similar in colour and type to those worn by Sergio Marchionne. In the Neolithic society of the Cucuteni-Trypillia, arms were a distinctive element of gender. Women were represented without arms because their social role was relating to decision-making and organisation. In the form of a mural, these sleeves can be found elsewhere in the exhibition, forming a circle not unlike the female Cucuteni-Trypillia statues that surrounded the matriarch.

Sergio Marchionne and Marcel Duchamp both had ties with Blonay, a town overlooking Lake Geneva. It was precisely on the pages of the local newspaper that Duchamp regularly drew birds. Interpretations of Duchamp’s drawings in relation to Blonay vary: some see falcons, others see parrots. Full Moon Sergio, the title of the exhibition, is also the title of a video. Snippets from TikTok are showing a goose walking on a conveyor belt projected on a nineteenth-century wallpaper from the Parrot Room in the Villa Antonielli D’Oulx in Rivoli (Turin). A treadmill associated with the era of Western expansion, coming to a brutal halt these days. But still trying to move forward, whatever the cost.

The installation Coulisses showcases the various galleries with which the artist collaborates. The four mannequins are taking a break, secretly smoking a Parliament cigarette in a corridor that is far too well lit. This relationship of inside-outside, of content-containing, and the idea of the corridor, are recurring themes in Alfredo Aceto’s work, and they are also perceptible in the stratification of the exhibition space. CIRCUIT’s storage houses a mobile of eggplants. Hanging Eggplants combines the austerity of mobiles in art history with the eggplant emoji. The eggplant was a symbol of success and prosperity for the Samurai of the mid-seventeenth century, and it is nowadays a symbol of explicit sexuality used in dating apps such as Grindr. The Tongue-Twister photographs explore the erotic world associated with business hotel gyms, featuring silicone tongues as organs of taste and language, as symbols of the passage between inside and outside.

Alfredo Aceto, born in Turin in 1991, is based in Geneva. He studied at ECAL (École cantonale d’art de Lausanne) and the MSA^ (The Mountain School of Arts in Los Angeles). He works in various media, including film, installation, text, and sculpture. Alfredo Aceto’s work has been exhibited in exhibition spaces and museums such as DOC! in Paris, Museo Pietro Canonica in Rome, Museo del 900 in Milan, Centre d’art contemporain in Geneva, Kunsthaus Glarus in Glarus, MCBA in Lausanne, CAPC in Bordeaux, and MAMCO in Geneva. Alfredo Aceto currently teaches at ECAL in Lausanne. In 2019, he received the Bourse culturelle Leenaards from the Leenaards Foundation. He has been shortlisted for the Swiss Art Awards 2024.