Photographs in Different Sizes

A l e j a n d r o C e s a r c o

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@parraromero i n f o @ p a r r a - r o m e r o . c o m

P a r r a & R o m e r o © 2 0 2 6 A L L R I G H T S R E S E R V E D

ALEJANDRO CESARCO
Photographs in Different Sizes
November 15, 2018 – February 2, 2019

Each person who sits down to write faces not a blank page but his own vastly overfilled mind. The problem is to clear out most of what is in it, to fill huge plastic garbage bags with a confused jumble of things that have accreted there over the days, months, years of being alive and taking things in through the eyes and ears and heart. The goal is to make a space where a few ideas and images and feelings may be so arranged that the reader will want to linger a while among them, rather than to flee…But this task of housecleaning (of narrating) is not merely arduous; it is dangerous. There is the danger of throwing the wrong things out and keeping the wrong things in; there is the danger of throwing too much out and being left with too bare a house; there is the danger of throwing everything out.

— Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (New York: Vintage, 1995), p.205

Photographs in Different Sizes, Alejandro Cesarco’s third solo show at the gallery charts different forms and technologies of preserving and organizing information. The ways in which information is collected, parsed, and archived, already, in itself, begins to tell a certain story. A family album, a book, a museum, an Instagram feed, a state archive. The exhibition questions how knowledge is produced through the different ways these collections of data can be read and narrativized. What is understood about the past relies on the existence of data about it. But these records, documents, memory traces and artifacts are always partial. Our systems of cataloguing attest to both an attempt at narrating the past and the impossibility of doing so truthfully, reliably, or objectively.

The exhibition includes the following works:

New York Public Library Picture Collection (Subject Headings), 2018,
6 archival ink-jet prints, 86 x 58 cm each. The NYPL Picture Collection contains well over one million original prints, photographs, posters, postcards, and illustrations from books, magazines, and newspapers, classified into more than 12,000 subject headings. Cesarco’s series of photographs looks into its organizing principles. The Subject Heading Binder is in some way the precursor to Google Image’s algorithm, but it is also a trace or a portrait of the librarians who have worked in the collection. The headings enable the navigation and use of the collection, while simultaneously signaling what is included and excluded from it.

New York Public Library Picture Collection (Subject Headings – Cross References), 2018, 4 archival ink-jet prints, 76 x 55 cm each. A sister series to the above, these are photographs of the “in-house” explanation of the NYPL Picture Collection subject headings. The way information and knowledge is organized and presented has been an ongoing concern throughout Cesarco’s work.

Untitled (Double), 2018, archival ink-jet print, 34 x 42 cm. A photograph depicting a corner of the artist’s desk.

Der Familienroman (The Family Novel), 2017, 4 archival ink-jet prints, 102 x 133 cm each. A photographic re-reading of the artist’s father’s Spanish edition of “The Complete Works of Sigmund Freud.” Cesarco simultaneously reads Freud through the lens of autobiography and looks at his father’s underlining and notations of Freud’s texts as a script to his own family history and dynamics.

A Portrait of Sherrie Levine, 2017, 2 archival ink-jet print, 56 x 76 cm each. A portrait of the artist is created by way of the checklist for Levine’s “Mayhem” retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum of Art (NY, 20012). The politics of alignment, placement, historical crushes, admiration and influences are recurrent and central motifs in Cesarco’s work.

Forty Seven Drawings by Marion Milner,2017, archival ink-jet print, 43 x 61 cm. A descriptive listing of all the drawings included in the English psychoanalyst’s classic text on creativity and its impediments, “On Not Being Able To Paint.”

The Difference Between Thirty Two and Forty Five, 2017, two color silkscreen, 13 x 18 cm. A humorous and literal depiction of the artist’s fears regarding aging as well as a direct wink towards the work of Larry Johnson.