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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. 

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