Tanya Leighton is pleased to announce ‘TRIANGULATION’ by Alejandro Cesarco, comprising a selection of works that the artist has configured into a single installation. In the space, three works – The Long Term (A Measure of Intimacy I), Long Casting (A Page on Regret), and Errata – are situated in a triangular relation that offsets a fourth, An Angry Silence. As a configuration, installation builds on the narrative potentials of triangulating objects as a mode of address. The exhibition’s title invokes triangulation to suggest an interest in deemphasizing a one-to-one correspondence between the viewer and each piece for the sake of intimating something that is more than the sum of its parts.

In science, triangulation is a technique used to amplify the validity of arguments by replicating the experiments by different means. In geometry, it is the process of determining an unknown location by forming triangles from known points. In psychology, it refers to a form of manipulation by means of indirect communication, using misdirection to coerce people. In the context of this exhibition, however, the term triangulation is primarily used to designate the geometrical figure formed by the perception two beings have of each other – be it two lovers or who we are and who we imagine to be – and the inevitable gaps that take place when perceiving the other. In this sense, triangulation calls into play various tactics of keeping the space of desire open or deferred and therefore active, most notably through discourse.

The relationship between desire and deferment is very old, as Canadian scholar and poet Ann Carson observes in her influential book, ‘Eros the Bittersweet’. In it, she studies one of the earliest descriptions of love as something at once “bitter” and “sweet”, found in Fragment 40 of Sappho’s surviving poetry. What follows is Carson’s translation.