Artissima 2022
Sebastiano Impellizzeri | Enrico Tealdi
Dopo l’Apocalisse
or
Observing the landscape after the flood. On unrecognisable places that capture viewers, guiding them and immersing them through a reality unveiled, revealed.
To reveal, from the Latin revelare, literally means to remove the veil: the concept of the stand proposed by Société Interludio is precisely that of uncovering work after work which, through the interplay of layers, are exposed in a reverie of awakenings.
Starting out from the gallery’s focal medium – that of painting – the original aim was to compare two of the gallery’s most representative expressive registers, investigating the theme of landscape in contemporary painting; thus a form of painting where the landscape is no longer secondary but becomes the protagonist of the work.
In Sebastiano Impellizzeri’s works on paper and canvas, colour – sometimes intense, sometimes rarefied – plays the leading role in what are nothing but abstract maps of the battuages1that inform, organise space and conceal other forbidden and hidden worlds. Impellizzeri’s is a painting of exasperated colours in the almost total loss of saturation, extinguished in the objectified white light, used as an element of spatial investigation. A path of strokes and light that seems to kill off all colour, dazzling it, vaporising it, one in which colour identifies with light and light identifies with space.
This drastic reductionist action, together with the rationalist compositional principle, continues to clash with the sensorial and emotional component, which constrains and binds the oscillations of the strokes to the chromatic matrix of the perception process. As the artist himself states in an interview, his are:
[…] places that lie outside the organised politics of society, anarchic and troublesome, hidden spaces of collective intimacy, formed amid a sense of excitement and nature and one that the obsessive social mores, forever in search of popular consensus, is all too often tempted to repress, prevent and avoid […]. For me, sketching them means stretching painting far beyond the canvas, to the point of rendering it in various times, spaces and ways. It’s a kind of painting that I begin at night, drawing on a great deal of exploration, pursuits, conversations and adventures, and thanks to which I may discover unmarked and informal paths through the grass, those beaten by the obstinate search for intimacy and driven by desire and excitement.
It is a form of painting that I then continue in the light of the studio, where I rework these paths into chromatic forms that trace the behaviour and the most secret emotions of what Georges Bataille calls the ‘homo eroticus’. In this way of painting, a powerful support for my memory and a great stimulus for my work are the very detailed sketches I make at night.
These visual notes enrich my vocabulary of shapes, colours and ideas, which I collect from the places I investigate. At the same time, it is a practice necessary to stimulate the eye, which must remain alert throughout the night, and finally it is also a device for the daytime elaboration that then takes place in the studio. The forms accumulated in the mind and in the sketches, all those paths through the grass, the thick brambles, the trees, earth, faces, looks, used tissues, worn-out condoms, the lights of cars in the distance and the movements of men in space are transformed into gestures of the hand holding the brush, and then once more into colours that become contents.
Each colour composition, each pigment chosen to make up those colours serves to describe either a moment or an action that occurred in that place, or indeed the place itself. Thus, a pink garanza lacquer combined with yellows and whites describes a movement; a blue mixed with payne grey and zinc white tells of an action that has taken place, and natural green earth mixed with a light cadmium yellow is the very place where everything happens. The articulation of colours and how they stand for contents thus seems to compose an obscure legend that is very difficult to read, and of which I neither provide nor seek interpretation: the only content of the work is colour, and once that content has been incorporated within it, it is no longer possible to remove it from its chromatic aspect. But in fact this is exactly the point of making a painting.
The landscapes in Fêtes galantes do not invite viewers to mere contemplation but call on them to be part of it. Although I am constantly confronted with the theme of the landscape and its key characteristics, I do not so much depict the landscape itself but rather the relationship it has with the bodies that enter into it: the landscape painting thus becomes a new field of action in which viewers cease to be a mere observers and are instead transformed into an indispensable element in the very definition of the space they observe. A landscape of intimacy to be entered, to be part of and of which to become part in its revealing before the world.”
Impellizzeri’s synthetic and conceptual painting stands in contrast to the rarefied and evocative landscapes of Enrico Tealdi. His is a reading of the landscape which reflects the poetics of the painter himself, working its way into a symbolic time, a transition towards the new, the memory of which is already inscribed in the moment things take place, enveloped in that slight veil of nostalgia that coats the moments memory retains.
His paintings envelop viewers in an arboreal casket, projecting them into an exotic, dreamy, vaguely nostalgic dimension, also thanks to the liquid tones of greens and grey-blues.
His is a painting that comes about through sedimentation. Layers and layers of colour embrace one another to create a kind of atmospheric painting, thanks to the use of multiple techniques, acrylic paints, powder paints and temperas.
Tealdi’s landscapes are intimate places that both separate and unite, that have been lived and loved, now left to the silence of abandonment. But after being abandoned, after the ruin, greenery returns. There are the flowers which continue to bloom, even though there is no one left to care for them.
As is said of him:
His are enchanting environments, yet ones pervaded by a melancholic atmosphere that does not open up to today’s ostentatious visibility, taking refuge in itself, quietly cultivating a discreet desire for isolation. The same goes for the dense vegetation in misty hues, rendered by Tealdi on soft paper gouaches. His paintings mimic nature; the grass is tall and rustling, the leaves hang heavily and the long trembling branches, struck by vivid flashes of light and rapid touches of colour, bring the sweeping backgrounds to life.
Hence, in the work of both Tealdi and Impellizzeri, landscape painting is used as a vector for meaning that goes beyond the surface of the form, and despite being before everyone’s eyes, those places are no longer mere parks, beaches or car parks, but from experienced and discarded ‘objects’, they become ‘subjects’ that reveal other worlds.
The onlooker may only contemplate and memorise in silence (the artist/voyeur), while the human presence transferred to the paintings disappears, leaving space only for eye witnesses: small
paintings of garden statues that observe without being able to recount what they have seen. All that remains is an evocation of a memory, a sensation of what went on in these places.
The stand proposed fully reflects the gallery’s statement, just as the proposal is that of a form of painting not of impression but rather of sedimentation, which requires time for its analysis and interpretation, so too Société Interludio – an ‘interludio’ is a musical interlude between two parts of a composition – aims to constitute an interval space, one of art and reflection, which each viewer may indulge in during his or her daily life by taking (back) time, in contrast with the frenetic world outside.
