Capsule Shanghai is pleased to announce its first presentation at Taipei Dangdai, which runs from May 11 to May 14, 2023. During the fair, Capsule Shanghai will exhibit a solo project by Alessandro Teoldi (b.1987 in Milan, Italy; lives and works in New York, USA).
The Italian-born artist's brand-new series of works made of fabric and ceramic focus on bodies and their physical, formal, and intimate relationships. The exhibited pieces deal with human forms, captured in groups, pairs, or alone.
Teoldi's textile works feature silhouettes made by cutting and stitching together pieces of cloth, a leitmotif in his research over several years. In these collages, he cuts out shapes from various industrial and handcrafted fabrics, which, once sewn together, comprise simplified human figures that look like shadows projected onto a dreamy organic screen.
For Teoldi, the materiality of the fabrics is very important, and he chooses each one for its natural color or tactile qualities. He sews these pieces of fabric himself. The process allows him absolute control over the development of the work, but also over himself as he carries out a sort of intimate inner dialogue that turns into an almost meditative exercise.
As he sews and arranges the figures, Teoldi always maintains a single plane on the surface of the chosen support, devoid of any sense of perspective. These human figures appear as epiphanies of interesting moments—reclining, solitary nudes sleep or rest, but more often, couples whose bodies intersect, unite, or dissolve in an embrace (or struggle). With arms outstretched, they embrace one another like laces, antennas, or tentacles, in search of contact and bonding—these arms are the ways in which they squeeze, hold, support, and sustain one another.
The four ceramic sculptures are rooted in an exceptional history. During a trip to Italy in summer 2022, Teoldi decided to stop in Albisola, a small town on the western coast of Liguria. Overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, the town has been famous for the manufacturing of handmade, artistic ceramics for centuries. In the early 1900s, Albisola became one of the capitals of modernism, and in the 1920s and 1930s, the Futurists arrived in the ceramic factories, with sculptors like Arturo Martini and Lucio Fontana following later. After World War II, Asger Jorn, Enrico Baj, Wifredo Lam, Piero Manzoni, Roberto Sebastian Matta, and many others were also drawn to Albisola. Teoldi chose to work in one of the town’s factories, the Ernan Design Studio, where he spent a month working intensely on these intimate figures and scenes. In these sculptures, the bodies once again intertwine in solid yet tactile configurations.
This series of sculptures shows the artist’s interest in retaining the same tactile, natural sensibility as his work in canvas and fabric. As a result, he chose to keep the original color of the terracotta, without painting or glazing the sculptures. In this way, the truth hidden in the material finds a direct connection to the truth of the artist’s gesture: the hand that sews the fabric is the same hand that presses, removes, or spreads the clay.
Text by Luca Bochicchio. Translated to Chinese by Qi Yule.
Luca Bochicchio is an Italian curator, critic, and art historian. He is the director of the Casa Museo Jorn in Albissola Marina, and a Senior Curator of the Museum of Ceramics in Savona, and he teaches the history of contemporary art at the University of Verona.
