Secession

ALEX DA CORTE
Slow Graffiti
6 July – 3 September 2017

The US-American artist with Venezuelan roots Alex Da Corte creates works – large-scale installations, videos and paintings – with an immersive effect that visitors to his exhibitions can hardly escape from. They radiate the sensual qualities of his worlds and a subversive humour that always contains resonances of something melancholy or wistful. Da Corte works with everyday items and mass-produced objects that he finds at flea markets, in dollar shops, thrift and home improvement stores. He transforms their original functions and meanings when, for example, he re-explores their formal potential and presents them alongside works by artists who are friends or whom he admires, or uses them as sculptural objects or props in his videos and installations so they can unfold new symbolic power.

The engagement with alienation, the complexity of human experience and various cultural practices is central to Da Corte’s art work. In this context he examines both the cultural and psychological aspects of, for example, desire, but also the uncertainty that the objects he manipulates and repurposes possess. Here, our familiar logic is suspended and its place taken by a state of deception and illusion. Da Corte’s confident (if unorthodox) use of colour is remarkable, as is his skilful melding of (geometric) abstraction and modern design with trivial everyday objects. High culture and pop meet in his works and the references to pop art in general – and its US American West Coast representative in particular – are both conspicuous and manifestly on equal footing.

Alex Da Corte, born in 1980 in Camden (New Jersey, USA), lives and works in Philadelphia.