Alejandro Cesarco's Exhibition 'Loyalties and Betrayals with Words' Explores Time and Banality

Alejandro Cesarco's exhibition 'Loyalties and Betrayals with Words' at Murray Guy in 2015 featured works engaging with themes of time, memory, and banality. The show included a 2014 piece referencing Ed Ruscha's 1976 pastel drawing 'Some pretty eyes and some electric bills', which recontextualizes beauty within mundane contexts. Two photographs depicted wall text for a fictional Ruscha retrospective, highlighting banality as an avant-garde strategy. A silent 16mm film from 2015, 'Mirrored Portrait', transferred to video, showed Cesarco's former photography teacher Panta Astiazarán taking his portrait after 16 years apart, focusing on the temporal gap rather than the image. Three 2013 photographs titled 'A Portrait of the Artist Approaching Forty (I–III)' captured worn studio floors as metaphors for aging. The gallery walls were painted in shades of grey, enhancing the exhibition's muted palette. Cesarco's newest 2015 video, 'Allegory, or, The Perils of the Present Tense', presented contemplative scenes including roses, rainy streets, and a woman examining works by On Kawara and Roni Horn while reading Alberto Moravia's 'Contempt' from 1954. Intertitles in the video featured philosophical phrases like 'Beauty as the promise of happiness'. The exhibition was reviewed in ArtReview's May 2015 issue, critiquing its approach to banality as lacking transformative power.