Damien Juillard, Alfredo Aceto

Damien Juillard: Light Sleepers is the first monograph dedicated to the artist’s work, taking his 2025 solo exhibition Liminal Tears at E-WERK, Galerie für Gegenwartskunst, as its starting point.

Working across images, sculpture, installation, printmaking and scent, Juillard draws from intimate life, pop culture and online spaces, where desire and forms of attention intersect with prolonged scrolling and meditation practices. Screenshots, quick drawings, fragments of text, stickers, portraits and found details move between screens, printed surfaces, sculptural elements and spaces. Through capturing and layering, Juillard draws out and reworks what is already there.

The book opens into an extended state of looking, where visual material keeps arriving, accumulating across the pages in a continuous stream. Images usually embedded in sculptural structures are freed from their architectural support to operate as the book’s raw material, extending spatial logic into print. What appears as an archive never quite settles: images are continually taken apart, altered and brought into new relations.

Light Sleepers brings Juillard’s work into dialogue with text contributions by writers and artists, ranging from philosophical and art-historical essays to poems and a letter.

Edited by Heidi Brunnschweiler and Damien Juillard
Texts by Mitchell Anderson, Marouane Bakhti, Heidi Brunnschweiler, Vidya Gastaldon, Martin Maeller, and Andrey Shental
Designed by Roman Aurelio Karrer

This first monograph on Alfredo Aceto offers a comprehensive overview of his manifold practice, across sculpture, installation, video, photography, and drawing. At the core of his 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.”

This volume includes an introduction by MAMCO Chief Curator Julien Fronsacq, an extensive conversation between Milan-based curator Milovan Farronato and the artist about his life, vocation, work, and references, and an overview essay by Annemasse’s Villa du Parc Director Julie Portier.

Born in 1991 in Turin, Alfredo Aceto lives in Paris and Geneva. Graduated from ECAL, Lausanne, The Mountain School of Art (MSA^), Los Angeles, and ENSBA Lyon, he has recently exhibited at Circuit, Lausanne, and MAMCO, Geneva (2024); MCBA, Lausanne, and Fondazione Merz, Palermo (2023); CAPC, Bordeaux (2023); Kunsthalle St. Gallen (2021); and Museo del 900, Milan (2019). Forthcoming solo exhibitions include LaM, Villeneuve d’Ascq, and Fondazione Pastificio Cerere, Rome, in 2027.