Shelters: Luca Campestri, Alessandro Teoldi: Off-Site Project

Sof:Art and Capsule are pleased to collaborate on the occasion of Shelters: Luca Campestri, Alessandro Teoldi. Hosted on the premises of Sof:Art and curated by Manuela Lietti, the double solo show presents the work of the two Italian artists together for the first time. 

 

Both inclined to using heterogeneous languages that reflect their respective multifaceted training, Luca Campestri (born in 1999 in Florence; lives and works in Bologna) and Alessandro Teoldi (born in 1987 in Milan; lives and works in New York) share a strong interest in image processing and re-processing. In the case of Campestri, images are taken from a vast photographic repertoire, accumulated in a way that is not necessarily aimed at the realisation of a specific artistic project. Teoldi's iconography is inspired by the history of art, in particular by the Roman school, as well as by gestures taken from everyday life. The works on display – in one case featuring natural architectures, in the other bodies – are infused by silence and formal rigour. In their essentiality they offer two complementary and speculative visions in which places and individuals seem to exist in a dimension of indefiniteness, transience, and vulnerability, each reflects on how the idea of ​​refuge, protection, non-place permeates the poetics of both artists.

 

Necrovalley (2025), Luca Campestri's most recent series, created in collaboration with Matteo Lisanti, portrays the architectures built by bathers during a day on the beach in the pine forest of Lido di Classe. This forest is mentioned by Dante in Il Purgatorio and by Boccaccio in Nastagio degli Onesti (one of the hundred stories of the Decameron). These wooden structures are imbued with an almost sculptural value. These temporary shelters are built, demolished, remodulated daily in a continuous modulation of presence and dilapidation. Fixed in time thanks to the artist's photographs before they disappear (and/or assume a different configuration) thanks to bathers, or nature itself, these uninhabited "dwellings" contribute to the creation of a ghostly, ephemeral landscape that appears to be dissonant with the idea of home/shelter as conveyed by the collective imagery. They are, therefore, the ideal extension of the artist's reflection on the notion of home. In Campestri's poetics the notion of “home” is never understood as a safe haven, either physical or mental, for which to yearn. Home corresponds, instead, to an impossible state of grace, to a constant sense of inhospitality that leads to the continuous unfulfilled search for and redefinition of what may be welcoming. These images also offer an interesting - albeit indirect - architectural document that records the changes experienced by the place portrayed. Evidence comes in the different types of wood transported to the shore and which reconstruct the recent history of the area (2022 and 2023, the years in which the photographs were taken), with specific reference to a flood that afflicted the region. Also present at the beginning of the exhibition are the two Necromass diptychs (2025) made with an analog camera from the 1960s that employs the “half frame” technique. This modality implies an aesthetic-narrative awareness which, reiterating the artist's interest in a reading of the image intrinsic to the process of producing the image itself, underlines the circularity of a path that leads from day to night, from the tangible to the intangible, which is activated by the two series on display.

 

The pieces on view by Alessandro Teoldi – also recently created (2022, 2023) – belong to his well-known cycle of works created using travel blankets distributed by various airlines. The blankets are collected along the disparate routes by the artist or by his friends and acquaintances. Textile fragments characterised by different tactile and material effects are cut out, combined, and re-sewn by Teoldi. Sometimes they are also combined with remnants of linen, wool, cotton, canvas, or even moving blankets. Deploying a graphic style, Teoldi portrays figures that refer to an archetypal imagery, and, therefore, are mostly devoid of distinctive features. The result are compositions in which human silhouettes are “photographed” (reminding of the artist’s education background) on the dunes, or on the rocks of a loosely sketched landscape, becoming universal in its indefiniteness. They are caught in the act of embracing each other, hiding until they get lost in each other. They are sleeping or immersed in their own thoughts, floating in a space shorn of any objects of affection and of any details that could reconstruct the experiences of the protagonists, beyond their presence. These human figures express a profound sense of solitude, but also incessant longing, perhaps illusory, for sharing and communion with others.

 

The blanket, an object that more than many others accompany a person throughout life, and which represents a metonym of the individual artist himself, is used as a kind of protective talisman, a vehicle that attempts to transfer the warmth of the intimate and familiar into a place of “passing through”, a space linked to the nomadic. In this time capsule, individual and collective, familiar and foreign destinies intersect precisely thanks to the blankets passed from hand to hand in a continuous circuit between an inevitable sense of disorientation and the search for comfort, however temporary it may be.