The Italian-born artist, who has lived in New York for the final twelve years, primarily works with cloth, so he can even present a big, diverse, and highly effective number of textile works on this exhibition. To create collages joined with needle and thread slightly than glue, Teoldi cuts easy but softly contoured geometric shapes out of varied industrial and handcrafted materials, which, as soon as sewn collectively, type simplified human figures.

For Teoldi, the materiality of the materials is essential, and he chooses each for its pure coloration or tactile qualities. He sews these items of cloth himself. The method permits him absolute management over the event of the work, but in addition over himself as he carries out a form of intimate interior dialogue that turns into an virtually meditative train.

Of their anthropological references, these important figures—virtually brutal of their excessive formal synthesis—recall the shadows mirrored on a magical natural display: the rock wall of Plato’s cave, towards which primitive males regarded, adoring, to see the big shadows solid by the firelight behind them.

As an entire and of their particulars, these works, imbued with delicate nuances, inform a common story: the poignant poetry of our moments of pleasure, tenderness, melancholy, and abandonment skilled on this earth. The Earth itself all the time seems as if in passing, recommended by vital and surprising parts of panorama. Located behind human our bodies caught within the act of embracing, touching, caressing, or preventing, the panorama is a discrete entrée into the infinite panic of Nature, typically devoid of spatial or environmental references, however stuffed with existential ones.

Standing out in opposition to these flat but dense areas, the figures intertwine their our bodies and virtually turn into alerts or signifieds of a modular, rhythmic language that inevitably tends in direction of abstraction. Teoldi’s visible communication is so highly effective due to his very good skill to translate a succession of human our bodies into this harmonious and summary ensemble. Of their archaism, they recall the primitives of the Italian Renaissance: Masaccio and Giotto. A lot nearer to our time, the on a regular basis types of American Pop Artwork, excessively replicated and overly simplified, had the identical abstracting impact because of the repetition and rhythmic alternation of visible components.

On nearer inspection, the our bodies that Teoldi stitches and recomposes have a plastic high quality; they appear to naturally aspire to the solidity of sculpture. In consequence, his determination to embrace the language of ceramic artwork seems fairly pure. The sequence of terracotta sculptures and excessive reliefs on view had been created in summer time 2022 in Albisola. Teoldi selected to interact with this historical method and lived for greater than a month inside one among Albisola’s historic ceramic factories, Ernan Design Studio. Teoldi didn’t really feel intimidated by his time in a manufacturing facility that had additionally made items by artists comparable to Lucio Fontana and Arturo Martini, who’ve actually made their mark on fashionable and modern artwork. Quite the opposite, it has stirred in him the necessity for an trustworthy and humble confrontation based mostly on dialogue and the concreteness of a plastic medium. Above all, the work of Martini, who referred to as himself “the Etruscan of the 20th century,” impressed Teoldi to interact with human figures and our bodies. In Teoldi’s work, they stand unknowing and unaware of their future, harking back to Picasso’s acrobats.

Alessandro Teoldi responds to the metaphysics of the Thirties with the hyper-modernity of our time. Similar to in his cloth works, the purity of the terracotta biscuit, with none glaze or coloration, is the start line for this physique of labor that displays on the connection between varieties, volumes, and important strains used to outline the portrayed our bodies. Within the reliefs, the profiles are engraved and furrowed with agency cuts. With these items, Teoldi has reached a brand new stage in his visible analysis: he merges the delicacy of the design with the novel nature of collages product of stitched cloth. The reality hidden within the materials finds a direct connection to the reality of the artist’s gesture: the hand that sews the material is identical hand that presses, removes, or spreads the clay.

at Capsule Shanghai
till July 15, 2023