The Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève presents Refaire le Portrait, Acte #1, the first of the two exhibitions that Alfredo Aceto, artist in residence will propose during his stay in the institution, between January and May.

In his practice, Aceto questions the notions of time, of personal mythology and his own past. His work is marked by the different personalities which he has encountered and involved in his projects, such as Paola Pivi, Roberto Cuoghi and Stephanie Moisdon. For example, his first artistic intervention came about when he asked French artist Sophie Calle – for whom he had a deep obsession – to tattoo her signature on his arm, thus making him part of her work. The clocks presented in Refaire le Portrait, Acte #1 were also born from an encounter, this time with the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo. The philosopher suggested that the artist make a work which would reactivate an anecdote from Walter Benjamin recounting a point during the French Revolution when Revolutionaries would shoot at the clocks of Paris to break the continuum of History. This idea of the target can also be found in the illustration of a deer, taken from a training target for hunters. This piece can be seen as a kind of anti-painting, in the sense that Aceto waives any pictorial or stylistic gesture, repainting the target in a hyperrealist manner, like a fake readymade. This series stems from the artist’s own experience, when, as a kid, he spent his holidays painting by a window, watching the hunters shoot. Fascinated by the equipment they used, Aceto borrowed the targets the shooters used for training and presented them as a result of his work.

Alfredo Aceto was born in 1991 in Turin. He obtained a Bachelor at the Ecole Cantonale d’Art de Lausanne in 2013. Alfredo Aceto will be in residence at the Centre until May 2015.