Alessandro Teoldi at Acappella

Artist: Alessandro Teoldi

Exhibition title: Variazioni

Venue: Acappella, Naples, Italy

Date: January 27 – March 3, 2023

Photography: © Danilo Donzelli / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Acappella, Naples

Un Chant d’Amour is the first and only film by the french writer Jean Genet: in an Algerian prison, an impossible love story between two cell neighbors, denied by the walls, by the bars, by an infamous voyeur warder and in any case always played in the power – dreamlike and otherwise – of redemption and liberation. From the denial of contact, Genet builds the primary sense of touching, as a non-mediated recognition of the self and the other.

The bodies touched, caressed and united in Teoldi’s Variations start from a privation probably similar to that of Genet’s captive lovers. There is a latent distance – therefore a relation of representation – a medium that progressively reduces to the zero degree of the flesh, of the nerve ending, of a cellular vibration on the skin.

If it is true, as is repeated, that every work of art concerns the concept of looking, Teoldi looks to the humblest and most earthly of the senses, which is touch.

Perhaps also for this reason, the specific manual action of sewing is at the center of his artistic research.

The fabrics that Teoldi cuts, sews and glues are civil aviation travel blankets, collected personally or with the help of friends.

They return the geographical duration of a space to be crossed and a dimension of absence, of a hug that has just ended or is waiting to become real.

It is as if these fragments of blanket are busy revealing the imprint of the figures they have wrapped.

From this point of view Teoldi, who is trained as a photographer, operates a sort of metaphor of the photographic process, outside the technical control of the chemistry, the machine and its digital program.

Anni Albers, one of the greatest graphic and textile artists of the last century, in a brief introductory note to her work, describes the substance of this process thus: “We live most of our life closed in on ourselves, with the desire to not to be alone, to include others in that life which is invisible and intangible. To make this desire visible and tangible, we need light and material, any material.”

In Teoldi’s Variations, this material is precisely the blanket, the piece of cloth. Psychology studies define it as a transitional object, the first symbol that the beginning of conscious existence chooses to bear its own separateness, the detachment of the me from the not-me. Identify the margin along which the inside awaits the outside, the intermediate area that prepares us for the encounter with the world; in some ways the moment in which, still children, the meaning of art is invented.