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rope) which Alfredo Aceto discovered during
his quest of Prypiat’s past. On the other side
lies down the replica of an horizontal window
belonging to Sara Winchester’s house, also
known as the Winchester Mystery House in
San Jose, California, whose story itself is a
modern myth (1881 – 1922). The dialogue
that exists between these two works, made
stronger by the portal that separates them,
can only be resolved through an epic mental
time travel – weaving the elements of the
show as a detective would do.
But what matters in Aceto’s practice is not
the solution. The jump in between times and
places which would appear, in the first place,
impermeable, is what profoundly interests
him. It is about disrupting the timelines and
geographies that help us read the past and
pave the way for a future, thus providing us
with new ghosts, new aliens, and new
knights, breaking the boundaries of a current
epistemological endemism. Modesty or Sur-
prise (2016), produced at the occasion of
an exhibition at Museo Pietro Canonica in
Rome, represents another attempt by the ar-
tist to travel through times. Obssessed by
the roar of Godzilla since his childhood,
Aceto recently had the desire to re-create
the sound by himself. Among the sculptures
of the museum depicting christian scenes
or renown soldiers, the sound of the fictional
monster resonates to the bones of the bron-
zes and marbles.
For his latest project to date, Endemisms,
Alfredo Aceto is, through urban sculptures,
furniture pieces, a video and a series of wa-
tercolours, re-interpreting Steven Spielberg’s
Duel (1971), which was shot during the early
years of the car-chase in cinema. For the
first time, the artist is using moving image
to build his “to be continued” epic and boun-
dless mythology.
Cédric Fauq
paint. The comic for Alfredo was a little boy,
Sophie was a charming woman, Paola per-
formed an act of magic, 2013, the engravings
for his Re-Mental Landscapes, 2016, and, for
his last series of drawings (Untitled, 2017),
the technical drawing and the amateurish
landscape watercolor painting – as depicted
in Edward Hopper’s Jo in Wyoming (1946).
Deliberately avoiding any essentialisation of
his work, Aceto’s solo exhibitions often give
the feeling to be group exhibitions. The in-
clusion of works he’s made as a child offer a
counter-point to his most recent productions,
creating, again, a temporal distortion in his
own biography, while making the bridge bet-
ween different narratives – the ones he used
to believe in, the ones he still wants to believe
in, and the ones he’s trying to make the wit-
ness of his works create by themselves. These
layers of stories belonging to the life of the
artist overlap with already written histories,
giving birth to an unresolved mythology.
Coming back to his solo-show at Bugada &
Cargnel: Everyone Stands Alone at the Heart
of the World, Pierced by a Ray of Sunlight,
and Suddenly It’s Evening, whose title, a
three-verses poem by Salvatore Quasimodo,
could be read as a tale, a statement and a
protocol for the exhibition, it is interesting
to underline the presence of different portals
– both temporal and geographical. The first
one (S.L.A.V.1, 2015), a theatre backdrop
style painting, represents the entrance of
the gallery in Torino where the artist had
his first solo-show. The second, (Loyal Sauce
B.C. - Noisy Whitish A.D., 2016), a large semi-
opaque PVC strip curtain, marks the passage
between two temporalities (and more), as
suggested by the title, but also two places
(and more).
On one side of this portal is standing (alone)
The Thinker (2016), the enlarged reproduc-
tion of a statue from the Cucuteni-Trypillian
culture (c. 5200 to 3500 BC – Eastern Eu-
