Il giorno della fine non ti servirà l’inglese (“On the Final Day You Won’t Need English”) is the title that artist Alek O. has chosen for his first solo exhibition in the Martina Simeti Gallery spaces. The phrase was taken whole from a Franco Battiato song before being raised to title, and this simple operation reflects a recurring attitude of the artist, i.e. that of drawing on fragments from the world around him and dislocating them, so as to observe and modify their very essence.
The exhibition features a site-specific installation – made up of reclaimed ceiling lights and doormats – along with some new and recent works made using everyday materials. On the final day (which has already come around several times, has it not?), some of the objects that have patiently populated our lives for so long are likely to survive us.
Incidental objects that, having been exposed to the lives of multiple people and designed to last, accumulate a latent collective memory, thus becoming hard to get rid of. Having moved to Milan years ago from Buenos Aires to study design, Alek O. intercepted a number of recurring elements that make up unnoticed threads of the city’s identitary fabric. The lowest common denominator of domestic condominium materials thus provides the landscape in which the artist switches between closed circuits, melts food substances and unhinges synthetic and functional textures, before recomposing and reassembling them once more.
– Excerpt from the text by Cornelia Mattiacci
Alek O. lives and works in Milan, where she graduated in Design from Politecnico. The artist’s works have been exhibited widely at institutional level, notably at the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rome (2021); The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House (2020); Nomas Foundation, Rome (2018); Fondazione Zegna, Trivero (2017); 16th Quadriennale d’Arte, Rome, Palazzo delle Esposizioni (2016); Triennale di Milano, Milan (2015).
