Alexandre Cruz (SESPER)

Born 1973 in Santos, Brazil
Lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil

The work of Alexandre Cruz, also known as Sesper, originates from a mix of various media, such as collage, painting, drawing, prints, and wood cutouts, crating highly intricate textured forms and compositions. Based on experiments made on paper and graphic digital manipulations, his work takes place mainly on wooden panels, incorporating a wide range of objects on the support, making a direct reference to the concept of assemblage. Sesper finds his sources in discarded materials, such as posters, magazines, newspapers, photographs, documents, and obsolete equipment, often given away by friends or belonging to his own archives. His process involves adding layers of meaning to elements that already carried previous sentimental significance. Simulacrum and original are fused to compose scenes of a society self-disoriented by psychoactive substances, short-circuited ideologies, Catholic guilt, and branding.

Sesper is a self-taught artist who has started his career in the Brazilian independent music and urban culture scenes. He strongly relates to the “DYI – do it yourself” philosophy, often associated with the alternative and punk rock movements. Sesper spent part of his teenage years skateboarding, making zines, and recording cassette tapes in his hometown of coastal Santos, in the state of São Paulo, Brazil. After joining various independent bands, in the beginning of the 1990s, Sesper created the band Garage Fuzz, one of the most important underground groups of the period, still active today. In São Paulo, he began to intervene in the streets with stickers and posters, adopting the pseudonym Sesper, while also experimenting with video, painting, silkscreen, and collage in his studio. Sesper has worked as a curator, being one of the founders of the seminal exhibition space Most, and contributing to the major show TRANSFER, exhibited in Porto Alegre and São Paulo (2008/2010). As a documentary filmmaker, he directed RE:Board, the result of an extensive research on the history of the art created on Brazilian skateboards. He also publishes experimental art books and zines, and release music via Outprint, his own publishing house/label.

Sesper has worked with commercial art galleries, such as LOGO, since 2011. His work has garnered attention in major art fairs, in São Paulo, Rio, and Miami, and group shows such as Perturbo, and Marker, with a disturbing installation: a peep-show booth showing religious adult films. In 2013, he was part of the group exhibition Deslize (Museu de Arte do Rio – MAR, Rio de Janeiro) and had a massive solo show, Reprovado, which was followed by a book with the same name. His work has been featured in national and international publications, such as +Soma, Arte Al Limite, Kolaj, Elephant, and Juxtapoz, and is part of the institutional collections from Itaú Cultural and Instituto Figueiredo Ferraz. Now the artist is represented in São Paulo by Fita Tape gallery.

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