Alex Cecchetti

A choreography for an achronic history of painting. Two dancers are confronted with different iconographies from Western and Asian painting. Without knowing those given to each other, when activating the performance, they will share a single drape to reproduce their own images. The result will be hybrid and unexpected forms, as if a painting by Giorgione could meet that of a Leonardo, or the lovers of Hokusai find themselves playing in between the drapes of the ascetic monks of Zurbaran.

Draperies, drapes and cloths as well as painting are always connected to the question of representation. If the form is the result and the synthesis of internal tensions, the drape in the paintings is the surface and the synthesis of what remains hidden and invisible in the image. But as in the dance of Salome, veil after veil, the unveiled image can only be invisible, for the nakedness of the image is its blinding absence. No more representation, no more eroticism.

In this non-linear history of painting, one can see a Koi swim. It is a Japanese fish, and also the metaphor of this project, where the drapes and bodies, the invisible and the visible chase each other, producing a blinking image on the surface. A baroque play of forms, for life with so many forms can only be baroque.

Dancers : Hélène Iratchet, Denis Terrasse

Cetaceans

concert / performance
for choir, glass harmonica and waterphone.

Cetaceans in a polyphonic concerto for a choir, a glass harmonica and a waterphone. The concert/performance is conceived to accompany the public along a whole sleep cycle of one hour and a half, exploring dreams, dizziness, time lapses and lucid dreams, as states in which a different form of communication is produced. The music partition is a hybrid composition in which music notation of choirs, holy music, poems and patterns of whale voices have been arranged together, intertwined, mixed and merged. A choir of singers have been trained to reproduce the sound of whale and to mix these non-human voices to the music.

Palais de Tokyo (Paris)
Soirée perfor(m)ée
23/02/2017 from 5 pm till midnight

For one evening, the artist Alex Cecchetti is offering an immersion into his very own interstellar, magical world. sheltered inside large “tent-curtains”, artists give tarot readings or dance to the sound of a piano. Further off, a glass harp accompanies a choir inspired by whale song, while Cécilia Bengolea dances amidst the audience on Alex Cecchetti’s poems.

New performances and collaborations with:
Marino Formenti (piano)
Milovan Farronato and Timothy Morton (Tarots)
Cecilia Bengolea (dancer in Clitoris)
Thomas Bloch (Glass Harmonica in Cetaceans) 
Aphrodite Mélodie and Perle Palombe (Le club Pour l’Emancipation du Hasard)

Curated by Vittoria Matarrese

Photos credit Aurélie Cenno

Conversation of the arrows is a duet featuring artist Alex Cecchetti and a dancer. The performance is a choreography for sorcerer’s apprentices, in which a dancer and a word-crafter fall into the trap of representation. They are doomed to chase each other represented as dogs, arrows, birds, stones, stars and more. For a moment, Cecchetti’s sculptures become the spells that the apprentices cast against each other and the scenario for their labyrinthic roaming. 

Performance by Alex Cecchetti, 'Belladonna', 2016 - video-performance, whisperers and foley artist.

Belladonna is a film which sound track is performed live by a choir of whisperers and a foley artist. Belladonna is based on Alex Cecchetti previous performance ‘Walking Backwards’, which took place in the garden of Jardins des Plantes in Paris and at Serralves Foundation, as well as on a related film as a collection ofstoriesoftreesandplantsnarratedinthatoccasion.

I am dead. My body has been found somewhere between Los Angeles and Warsaw, dismembered. Murder, accident, suicide, detectives haven’t found anything relevant, my identity is still unknown and me also, I don’t remember much. This is why I have decided to investigate over my own death myself. Only clue, in a secret pocket sewn inside my trousers, I have recovered a fragile piece of paper torn from the pages of a book, written there, the words Tamam Shud, ‘this is the end’.

The show is a post mortem investigation of the victim on his own assassination.  In this dark and grotesque stand-up comedy Alex Cecchetti is accompanied in the investigations by two singers, a countertenor or contralto and a glass harp. The sound track of this collective incantation contain classical baroque music, medieval music and gospel. Among the songs: Ecco la Primavera by Francesco Landini; O Solitude by Henry Purcell; Era Venus al termin del suo giorno by Paolo da Firenze, Miserere Mei by Gregorio Allegri etc...

Copy of Marie-Madeleine otherwise said Marie l’Egyptienne
Silicone rubber and plaster
Alex Cecchetti 1311-2015

Vittorian handrail, walnut wood
Please touch the sculpture from the beginning till the end
Choreographic tool for spectators
Alex Cecchetti 2015

Oil on paper
Repeated choreography of movements around a teapot
Alex Cecchetti 2015

Nuvolari aims to incite a dialogue between diverse forms of expressions, culture, eras and intentions.

The exhibitions are designed in relation to various private and public spaces, putting into practice the cohabitation of objects among themselves and with humans, beyond the logic of the museum.

With­in Nuvolari, objects reclaim their magical, metaphorical and cultural predicates and become inhabitants.

Nuvolari is an athlete created by Alex Cecchetti and Blanche de Lestrange, and makes exhibitions that excite your eccentricity.

PARADISE GEOMETRY
Video 21’ - Alex Cecchetti 2014

In 2014, Alex Cecchetti had an exhibition in Heaven. To make it accessible to everyone a film of the artist giving a tour guide is documenting the show.

Oil paint on paper, different dimensions
Alex Cecchetti 2014

Confronting with the concern of a painting being a surface on top of other surfaces, Golden Gate is oil paint folded and impressed on one paper after the other to produce different painting without  layers. The genealogy of one image is related to those who came before and those that appeared after. 

Nuovo Mondo (New World) is a performative seminar on poetry created and curated by Alex Cecchetti. A walk through the concentric circles that descends ascents through the building of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. For 3 days Alex Cecchetti accompanies the public through these narrow passages where artists embody poems.

With: Alex Cecchetti, Antoine Davenne, Clarisse Herrenschmidt, Francesco Pedraglio, Cécilia Bengolea, Heather Phillipson, Catitu Tayassu, Tim Etchells, Joris Lacoste et Laure Prouvost

China Ink on Paper, Variable dimensions
Alex Cecchetti 2014

Mémoires is a series of erotic drawings that tries to reproduce a moment in time. The drawings are collected together in a folder and exhibited one after the other from the first one to the last one. At the end the folder is closed and the drawings cannot be exposed to the same audience again.

Devised and orchestrated by Alex Cecchetti, Voices of Urgency invites the public to four events where poetry is summoned to play a fundamental role within our society. Poets are called to enter in discussion with researchers of different domains.

The public event is presented and produced by FIAC and hosted by Ecole de Beaux-Arts Paris, in the historical Amphitheatre.

The program Voices of Urgency 2014

1.      Beyond Human experience
With : Yuri I. Manin (mathematician, Russia),Serhiy Zhadan (poet, Ukraine), Eileen Myles (poet, USA)

2.      The metaphors we live by
With : Serhiy Zhadan (poet, Ukraine), Grzegorz Wróblewski (poet, Poland) et João de Pina-Cabral (anthropologist, Portugal)

3.      The language to come
With : Vinciane Despret (philosophe et ethnologist, Belgium), Abdellatif Laâbi (poet, Morocco), Cecilia Vicuña (poet, Chili).

4.      Desire & Revolution
With : Ariana Reines (poet, USA), Luca Greco (sociolinguist, Paris III, EHESS, Italy/ France) and Peter Semolič (poet, Slovenia)

Louvre 
Tour guide of the Louvre without the Louvre
Alex Cecchetti, 2013

A tour guide of the Louvre without the Louvre. By the use of rhetoric, dance and collaboration with the public, the masterpieces of the collection of the Louvre are summoned from the domain of the invisible. 

“In this last performance Mr. Cecchetti transported the ancient greek and roman collection of the Louvre to Gasworks, using the visitor’s imagination and bodies, filling the space with spiral staircases, statues of giants and hermaphrodites. Thanks to all that came and to Mr. Cecchetti for making everything from dolphins to the Louvre fit inside Gasworks!”
Gasworks Situation | Event 2013

Story Line
Performance, Story, Blackberries on wall
Alex Cecchetti 2013 

Venues:
Rowing Projects, 2013 London
Prix Fondation Ricard 2013, Paris
Kunsthal Aarhus, 2014, Danemark 

“When this story enjoys it from the front its name is Marie, when it enjoys it from the back its name is William.” Marie & William is part of a new series of performances by Alex Cecchetti. A story is told and visualised while drawing its internal structure. The drawing choreographs the body of the storyteller while also working as a mnemonic artefact.

Performance
Alex Cecchetti 2013 

Venues:
In Process, Jardind des Plantes, Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle, FIAC 2013, Paris

One by one, people are invited to literally walk backwards, by a guide into a narrative path. The act of walking backwards generates in the visual field of the viewer a series of unpredictable images. Like in a movie or in a dream, he who walks backwards does not know the nature of the objects and images to come. The world does not unfold smoothly to the view and to the experience, images and objects do not approach us gradually from afar, but appear suddenly to us as from out of nowhere, and then they become more intimate, departing from us while always remaining on sight. What once was used to disappear behind our back, the past, is now longing in the distance, and the future is now on our back. Even in this condition, the human being can find a balance, and walking backwards suddenly will not be perceived as something so unnatural. The spectator becomes the machine of the spectacle; the point of perspective has shifted, and the cinematic image is produced by the movement of its spectator. The guide become the voice off of the images, whispering in the ears of the specatetor the story of the place and the fantastic anecdotes inspired by it.

drawings and birdcallers
spectators can use the drawings as music partition for the birdcallers and create the soundtrack of the exhibition.
Alex Cecchetti 2012

Song of Solitude BOOK
15 Silkscreen drawings and one birdcaller
20 editions
drawings can be played as a music partition
Drawings: Alex Cecchetti
Graphic Design: Goda Budvytyte

Oil paint on two papers 70 x 101 cm
attempt to paint without  layers 
performative installation
Alex Cecchetti 2012

Performance relay
Alex Cecchetti, 2012 (ongoing) 

“Alex Cecchetti’s “relay performance” Summer Is Not the Prize of Winter, 2012, is a deeply satisfying meditation on the nature of existence and the capacity of language, image, and object to embody life’s most essential concerns. The Paris-based artist conducts this philosophical investigation through an interactive monologue with a group of participants in the gallery; one performance a day. Cecchetti began by conducting three performances, which established the work’s narrative arc, and then he handed the process over to local artists and writers. Each of the four successive performers shadows his or her predecessor to create continuity; all of them are entrusted with the task of remembering and transferring the same reflections and lines of inquiry.
The handmade and found objects lying around the room or propped against the walls accumulate as they are sited or created during each performance. These objects become anthropological artifacts of the temporary community catalyzed by Cecchetti’s engaging mind.
Cecchetti creates an environment of empathetic pathos and intimacy that values human connection.The arrangement of bodies in the room shifted constantly as Cecchetti’s poetic language enigmatically bound the participants and the objects together through ritualized forms of communication.”

— Stephanie Snyder on ARTFORUM Critics’ Picks

Choreography for hidden nudes.
Alex Cecchetti 2012
Dancers perform  while hiding from spectators.
Each time a different photographer is invited to take pictures of the dancers when they are not aware of becoming an image.

Venues:
Salle Ovale Richelieu, Bibliothèque Nationale de France BNF, Paris 2013
MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Roma, 2012
CAC Vilnius, Lithuania
Alex Cecchetti 2012

Blue powder pigment on paper
The drawing has no right side, from every side you see it it is a bird 
Alex Cecchetti 2012

The public is invited to enter in silence and individually a space in which six dancers are sleeping on the floor.

After the spectators have find their places, a seventh dancer tells about a short experience he had with his brother, later revealed to be a dream. The story is whispered at the four corner of the room to let the audience enter the narcotic rhythm of the dancers until their possible awake.

During the sleep of the dancers a series of drawings are sketched on a notebook. 

Walking around the Louvre entrusting my collection of stones to sculptures.
unauthorized performance
Alex Cecchetti 2012

Walking around the Louvre with my collection of stones in the pockets and progressively entrusting each stone to one sculpture till to have the pockets empty. Now each time I want to see my collection of stones I go to the Louvre. Stones are still there.

Choreography for a transformation from dancers into dogs, arrows, birds, stones, stars and nothing.
Images from the performance during the show "Danser sa Vie" 2012, Centre Pompidou, Paris, and at the National Opera Theater in Vilnius, Lithuania same year.
Alex Cecchetti 2012

A casting mold from the archive of the Museum of the Louvre has been used to reproduce a copy of the classical sculpture it conceals. The process of a bronze casting has been followed. The process has been stopped at the wax copy, which represent the maximum precision of reproduction. The empty space inside the wax copy has been filled with plaster. This copy of the void that its hidden in the sculpture is the work. What it is shown is the imprinting of the movement necessary to produce such a copy, a space of creative freedom inside of a crystallized aesthetic form.

Created by Alex Cecchetti and inspired by the literary Italian salons of the eighteenth century, the SALON DU MERCREDI, gather together artists, writers, curators, dancers, philosophers and many others around an issue, a paradigmatic question to discuss, in order to create knowledge.  

Participants :
Alex Cecchetti, Lorenzo Benedetti, Benoît Maire, Raimundas Malasauskas, Simone Menegoi, Darius Miksys, Francesco Pedraglio, Chris Sharp, Alexandre Singh, Caterina Riva, Elodie Royer, Sandra Terdjman, Pieternel Vermoortel, Krõõt Juurak, Kristan Kennedy, Adam Kleinman, Nicolas Matranga, Darius Mikšys, Aaron Schuster, Jennifer Teets, Christian Frosi, Mark Geffriaud,

Venues:
Headlands, Center for the Arts, Sausalito, SF, California 2014
Kunstvlaai: Festival of Independents, Netherlands, 2012
Centre international d’art et du paysage de l’île de Vassivière, France, 2010

Performance, books
Ride Ride Ride is an improvised reading of different book's fragments in the attempt to construct a new narrative and a new story.
Alex Cecchetti since 2008

Performatve game
Alex Cecchetti 2006 (ongoing)

Since 2006 I GIOCATORI is a performance/game that active dialogue between two artists, through conflicts and agreements, associations and misunderstandings caused by unexpected relationships of actions and materials. I GIOCATORI process from a meeting  between two artists to an emerging protocol of rules that have been never set beforehand. Out of this dialogue between artists one can observe a sculpture, as if the words, the free constructions of sense, conflicts, proposals and agreements became visible in the form of a visual narrative, a habitable assemblage. The space that “I Giocatori” creates is in between the studio and the exhibition, a place in which the two artists discuss methods, confront their imagination and produce meanings in constant transformation.

Early participants : Christian Frosi, Etienne Chambaud, Diego Perrone, Alexandre Singh, Vanessa Billy, Mark Geffriaud, Gyan Panchal, Falke Pisano, Julia Cima, Liudvikas Buklys.