UNTITLED/UNTITLED/UNTITLED

Untitled/Untitled/Untitled, print paper, variable dimensions, 2006, courtesy of the artist

The poetic prose “ because you’re young”, often creates its own phantasmagoric aureole. The fact of being an emergent artist exists until that moment, when the game becomes “hard core” and politics substitute art for “necessity”. This comparison is valid for architecture now days, as a system tightly connected with the social aspect. If we intimate that art in itself is a segment of necessity, then lets contemplate. After all “because you are young” lures to the dream of an artist in a permanent context to be a superstar, but at the same time emergent, whose status, for which the system of art creates unlimited space and particular attention. For me this was not the main scope. The interesting thing was that during the last years at “Accademia delle Belle Arti di Brera” in Milano (2001-2002), when I realized my first projects, “site-specific” performances and installations, I was not reflecting on the internal rules that govern the system of art, but: how to create the axis of my work. Moreover, interesting were how this projects continued.

UNTITLED/UNTITLED

Untitled/Untitled, print paper, variable dimensions, 2007, courtesy of the artist

During 2002-2006, I was interested less on the work as an artist, rather started working on projects as an independent curator at “National Gallery of Arts” in Tirana, a residence for artists at “Cite International des Arts “ in Paris, wrote many articles regarding the media in Albania, and published books on the critics of art and poetic prose. It was during the 2007-th when I returned to Milano and started working as an artist, first by recycling some of my old projects and later got more interested on videoart, realizing various videos in a cinematographically elaborated context. Ironically, the only media that didn’t fancy at all was the video. Meanwhile I am immersed in this medium of production, which before was outside of my project’s interests. This has its own explanation. I have been always fascinated by the cinema, and in my videos the influence of the films is indisputable. My works, being more than videos, are the re-dimensioning of a broad and complex cinematographic context.

EXTERMINATORS

Exterminators, pen on print paper, variable dimensions, 2006, courtesy of the artist

Exterminators is a series of charcoal drawings over the handwritten proof roll of Albanian artist Fani Zguro’s story collection “Mr. Dosti”. Straight out of heavy metal’s imagery, straight out of skulls, teeth and sunglasses sole witnesses of the presence of a body, Fani Zguro’s exterminators are also featured in some of William Burroughs’ hallucinated stories. Like dried-up bugs buried within the roll’s papers, the exterminators’ reflectumorous features come scarring Mr Dosti and his brothers. They prevent onlookers from reading, as they prevent the writer from pursuing the story of The Man Who… There’s no more ending, there’s no more end, there’s no more hope nor blood in the vessels; all vision is exterminated… I didn’t want anyone to care about the rolls I kept arranging at night as library cards for suckling mice… yet the vaudeville brother withdrew entwining dark presences, invisible to me… In many occasions did I witness such mouth-agape rites… A few minutes later they chit-chatted calmly, checking the cards while exterminators poured in… I used my car, a black Ford V8, working on my own, carrying my pirethrum spray cans and my fluoride bulbs up and down the stairways… “Exterminator! Any need for my job?”

Alberto Pesavento

KINGS, QUEENS, LEADERS, HEROES AND OTHERS...

Kings, Queens, Leaders, Heroes and others..., acrylic on print book, 29X20cm, 200 paintings, 2007, courtesy of the artist

Differently from other artists that conceptualize their works as documented performances, in my videos is inherited something completely different. They are not trying to describe something rather to infer. This narrative style, which accidentally is related to the American cinematography, inherits in its totality a cinematographic context. In these videos which belong particularly to the year 2007, the camera recycles certain avangards of the film like nouvelle vague , underground cinema, film noir and above all is attached to the 90s video artists like Steve McQueen, Tacita Dean or emergent artist like Anri Sala or Ruma Islam. In this aspect it doesn’t bother me the recycling context or the resemblance. That what interests me is what comes out of videoart looking at the cinema, which in my opinion is a novelty and presence which will not be exhausted in the art of millennium. I hope that my productions will carry naturally this context and this feeling, in which things are not happening accidentally, but thanks to a long reflection and study to what will go.

PAINTINGS 1982/2007

Paintings 1982/2007, oil, acrylic, color water, pen, carbon on paper and print paper, variable dimensions, 1536 paintings, 1982/2007, courtesy of the artist

Another important aspect of my work is various dimensions that are offered by painting. After I finished the high school for painting in 1996, I didn’t paint that much, and only during 2006 started to recycle all my paintings that I stored during my child years till ’90. This recycling consists in grouping hundreds paintings and simple drawings, above which I write various English words taken from the dictionary. This pertains to the older cycle, meanwhile above the infantile paintings I have written passages from Artaud’s “ Per fare finire con il gudicio di dio”. This duality is not casual in this cycle. It reflects about the duality that goes through all my work, which is segregated in two main opposite directions, at least compared with the linguistic which is very important in the work. However that which determines and creates the unification of the artwork is its context. Many can paraphrase this duality, remembering the way Douglas Gordon works, and the philosophical specification of duality or the double phenomenon, that ancient greeks determined it as a discrepancy of the character, a state which causes psychic anomaly or to put it another way; the schizophrenia of being. In my work both assumptions stay out of the scope of my projects. Personally I approve that “no man is an island” and everything is created on the duality ratio. Even when we have to do with a case of extreme individuality, the second voice breaks the silence creating the duality of being.

THE DECEIVEDS

The Deceiveds, acrylic, pen, carbon on paper, variable dimensions, 89 paintings, 1995/2008, courtesy of the artist

Even a prisoner in the dark hallways of Dyma, creates his own equivalence by chatting to himself and remembering stories, telling stories to himself, visualizing utopias. All this is an endless montage. With this I am not referring to the process of creating a video, but to all my work, which works as a recycling laboratory, which goes back to the old projects by re-dimensioning them and adapting them in a new context. It is very important for my work to show those particular stories manipulated by ready made products offered by the systems. Nowadays “describing” is unnecessary. As though “because you are young” should not create its own phantasmagorical aureole, but should reflect on all things if contemporary art is a necessity or “emergency”…