Film & Video (Film & Video)

Slow Graffiti was produced for Da Corte’s exhibition at the Vienna Secession in 2017. The video is a shot-for-shot remake of the film “The Perfect Human” by Danish filmmaker Jørgen Leth (1967). The original is narrated in an anthropological manner, or as if listening to a guide at a zoo, but Da Corte’s version is stranger and more philosophical.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Three hours west of New York City is the town of Centralia, Pennsylvania. The story of this eastern ghost town’s demise has become legend: in 1962 burning trash ignited a vein of anthracite coal, starting an underground fire that continues to burn today, forcing the town’s depopulation. Centralia has since become a pilgrimage site; or rather a mile-long stretch of state route 61 outside of the town that sits abandoned, its surface buckled and cracked by the underground fire.

Painting (Painting)

His Deck Painting I recalls the simplistic stripes of conceptual artist Daniel Buren, or the minimal lines of twentieth century abstract painting, but is in reality a readymade, fashioned from repurposed fabric of deck chairs. Alexandre da Cunha reinvents found objects in surprising ways that combine the material characteristics of Arte Povera with the concerns and techniques of painting. Da Cunha’s work often features flags—either as a found material per se or as a constructed form—that reflect the artist’s interest in issues of nationality, governmental politics, allegiance, and culture.

Glaze (Savana) (2005) is an assemblage of found materials: a car wheel, a tire, and a wooden plinth of the type traditionally used to display sculpture. It directly engages with the readymade, a subject that Alexandre de Cunha takes up throughout his practice, often inflecting it with a tropical, and South American–inspired materiality and painterly style that could potentially come across as a stereotype. Here, da Cunha transforms the component parts into a composition that highlights often-overlooked materials of artistic production and cultural mass-production.

Painting (Painting)

In Laissez-Faire (Rainbow Flag) da Cunha has turned a beach towel into both a painting and a flag. Where the printed surface of the towel originally served to enliven this commodity, here the pattern—now stretched and re-presented—suddenly refers to abstract painting’s promises of transcendence. And its crisply painted shape pulls the printed colors into the rectangularity of the canvas and, as da Cunha notes, the graphic iconicity of flags.

Photography (Photography)

The series West (Flag 1), West (Flag 3), and West (Flag 6) continues da Cunha’s ongoing exploration of the form’s various vertical, horizontal, and diagonal stripes. Here, da Cunha overlays thick bars of color (blue, green, and red) on photographs of the ocean at sunset with surfers in floating on the horizon. The solid colors contrast with the fading colors reflected in the sunset, and the tilted orientation suggests a familiar California beach scene.