L’accordo
Giulia De Giorgi
Francesca Antonini Arte Contemporanea is pleased to present Enrico Tealdi's third solo show in the gallery, with works made by the artist in the last two years. Large-format canvases alternate with smaller ones and works on paper. Cliffs, maritime pines, beaches and woods are inhabited by figures placed on what could be perceived as the border of the landscape, but which in reality, welcome them in an immersive and all- encompassing way. These scenarios are united by the delicacy, the wisdom of gesture and the painterly expression. The artist depicts daily rituals: "an afternoon in the sun, resting in the shade of a tree, listening to the voices you love. An invitation to connect with what surrounds us", in search of "a clandestine encounter with oneself. "
Tealdi's painting is revelation. The scene appears to us beyond a fade, the glare is blinding and revealing at the same time. The dusty colors blur the outlines, while the light makes the shapes manifest, in a process that alternates rarefaction with condensation.
Due to additions, the layers of paint sediment and, in the small works as well as the big ones, it is the color that build the shapes. The work on the canvas, however, also gives space, it unravels, until showing raw, naked traits, which the artist's hand leaves undisturbed, virgin. The mixed technique with oil, acrylic and pigments finds its place on recovered canvases, favored by the artist in recent years, who can thus add new chapters to the story already experienced by the medium.
Tealdi's painting is figure. In the exhibited works, human figures complete the landscape on tiptoe, to seal the rediscovered union between man and nature. Groups of people stretch their gaze towards an indefinite horizon, aware that the long-coveted search for Arcadia has ended, and that it is manifesting around them. They gather in symposia to celebrate the occasion and the titles of the works testify to this.
The characters of this narrative that unfolds before our eyes are at the same time observant and standing: the figure is like the tree, it is like the rock, it is one of the elements of the landscape, it holds the same value, it is an organic form as well as the others that we immediately recognize as natural.
Tealdi's painting is nature. It is like investigating with a binocular in the distance through the pictorial windows open to the outside, which reveals us this truth: we are made of the same essence as what surrounds us. The natural detail becomes magnificent, the tree becomes a figure itself, the landscape is portrayed, it is a tale.
The dialogue with nature takes place in front of us.
Before our eyes, an apparition. Everything suddenly seems clear to us, it does not happen, but it is, in the fullness of a gaze, that lacks nothing. We are witnessing the very moment of fulfillment, the zero degree of the ecstatic moment, the fullness of the here and now.
Tealdi gives us the beauty of simplicity, the pure and profound aspect of natural and human things. He welcomes us without reserve into his world, which from intimate becomes universal, and from contingent becomes eternal. It reveals the secret to positioning ourselves outside the current of history.
... potrò ben io fra queste deserte piagge, agli ascoltanti alberi, et a quei pochi pastori che vi saranno, racontare le rozze ecloghe, da naturale vena uscite; così di ornamento ignude esprimendole, come sotto le dilettevoli ombre, al mormorio de’ liquidissimi fonti, da’ pastori di Arcadia le udii cantare... (Jacopo Sannazzaro, Arcadia – Proemio, 1504)
PRESS REVIEW