“How do we choose our specific material, our means of communication? ‘Accidentally.’ Something speaks to us, a sound, a touch, hardness or softness, it catches us and asks us to be formed. We are finding our language, and as we go along we learn to obey their rules and their limits. We have to obey, and adjust to those demands. Ideas flow from it to us and though we feel to be the creator we are involved in a dialogue with our medium. The more subtly we are tuned to our medium, the more inventive our actions will become. Not listening to it ends in failure.”
— Anni Albers 1
Marinaro is pleased to announce “duet”, Alessandro Teoldi’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, occupying both gallery spaces.
The past two years has radically shifted Teoldi’s practice, as limited access to his studio forced the artist to rethink materiality, both in terms of accessibility and practicality. Chance at-home experiments gave birth to a brand new body of concrete bas-relief works, shown for the first time in New York. The confines of the artist’s apartment made him reconsider the idea of ”home”: a space that functions as an intimate container and an essential sculptural entity. Concrete, simultaneously a domestic and industrial material, interests Teoldi due to the transformation it undergoes— the idea that something as epimeral as a dust can stabilize into something so durable and long-lasting.
The process originates with paper collage drawings created by the artists that are then covered by fast-setting concrete and left to solidify. When the paper is peeled away from the form, the image remains relieved into the surface— a remanent of a drawing that is now destroyed. Teoldi utilizes different paper types for the collages, resulting in a variety of textural in the reliefs. The imagery ranges from figurative to landscape to still life, expanding upon his documentation of human interactions and the domestic.
Juxtaposed in this exhibition with the artist’s signature figurative fabric works, some of his largest to date, the conceptual similarities and differences become apparent. There is a tension between the transience of the blanket works and the permanence of the concretes, one that speaks to a feeling of displacement from places and those that we love. Considered together, both mediums allude to touch and connection— between artist and material, material and image, human and place, human and human, humans and time— functioning as an allegory for the rediscovered community and the desire for togetherness.
At Marinaro, New York
until May 21, 2022