Everything I See I Swallow

Sea View is pleased to present _Everything I See I Swallow_, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Alessandra Acierno. Acierno's paintings introduce what the artist describes as "unstable encounters", scenes imbued with unseen or unresolved tension, creating a low-simmering unease that permeates the exhibition. A troubled glance, a moment of undress, a murky figure, a landscape at witching hour– Acierno's paintings could almost allude to a piece of Medieval folklore or parable. However, rather than unfolding along a singular narrative path and delivering a moral lesson, the works are connected by their cryptic psychologies and reinforced through palette, composition, and shared motifs. Central to this body of work is the figure of the double, or doppelgänger—a longstanding literary trope in which a character encounters a mirrored, altered, or repressed version of the self. From Dostoevsky's The Double to Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the double often embodies impulses that the original self attempts to contain, making what appears familiar suddenly strange or threatening. Acierno's interest in doubling has developed alongside her experience of becoming a mother to a daughter, turning her attention toward adolescence—particularly female adolescence and early adulthood—as a period similarly marked by tensions between identification and estrangement, or familiarity and difference. Further references include Edvard Munch, Henry Fuseli, and Balthus, artists whose treatment of familiar subjects, like Acierno's, complicates narrative legibility and suspends the image in morally indeterminate territory. This ambiguity is essential to Acierno, for whom a lack of clarity is generative. Rather than resolving the moral questions raised by an unsettled image, the paintings leave them deliberately open. The viewer is likewise drawn into this Balthusian uncertainty of Acierno's making. Subjects frequently glance outward, making observation itself a crucial part of the emotional structure of the image and implicating the viewer in the scene unfolding before them. The artist is interested in the way being watched transforms an act, destabilizing the boundary between private and public and challenging the presumed neutrality of looking. The resulting paintings preserve a certain inaccessibility at their core, gesturing towards the unruly unconscious of both artist and viewer.