Alfredo Aceto (born 1991 in Turin, lives and works in Lausanne) is an artist working in painting, sculpture, drawing, and sound. Aceto has a singular approach, mixing personal anecdotes and art historical references. His obsessional relationship with French artist Sophie Calle, for instance, ended with her signature tattooed on his arm. Such stories lay the groundwork for many of his projects that deal with obsession, time, memory, identity, and death.
At the core of Aceto's work lies the desire to explore and create connections between reality and the imagination, fiction and autobiography, fantasy and specific obsessions—from the Neolithic civilization of the Cucuteni-Trypillia to the myth of the super-entrepreneur embodied by former FIAT executive Sergio Marchionne. This exploration draws on the artist's interest in the way creative gestures make it possible to transform stories and blur what is taken for granted. For him, the artwork is never the visual synthesis of a story, but rather the virtuoso result of a gradual digression that gives rise to a form at once independent and ambiguous. Good at creating works that are mysterious and seductive, elusive and striking, playing both with their possible usefulness and extreme eccentricity, Aceto's universe is one that must be deciphered in order to understand how personal and collective narratives intertwine. Inspired by sociology, art history, and gender studies, his work examines identity, self-representation, sexuality as an act of resistance, language, the body and its absences, traumas and emotional imprints. Explaining his working method, the artist states: "I work like a writer who doesn't write. I try to make distant, sometimes dystopian narratives coexist. It is a work of archiving, patience, and reconstruction."
Alfredo Aceto is graduated from ECAL. His work has been shown at Centre d'Art Contemporain, Geneva; Musée Jenisch, Vevey; Kunsthaus Glarus; Cosmic Galerie (Bugada & Cargnel), Paris; Museo del 900, Milan; Peep-Hole, Milan; Circuit and MCBA, Lausanne; MAMCO, Geneva; Fondazione Merz, Palermo; CAPC, Bordeaux; Kunsthalle St. Gallen; Museo del 900, Milan; LaM, Villeneuve d'Ascq; Fondazione Pastificio Cerere, Rome. In 2015 he won the Kiefer Hablitzel National Prize.