Alessandro Teoldi “Your Distant Voices”

Marinaro

[Image: Alessandro Teoldi "Untitled (Quatar Airways, Air France, British Airways, Norwegian, Hawaiian and American Airlines)" (2019) inflight airline blankets 60 x 84 in.]

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Marinaro presents Alessandro Teoldi’s Your Distant Voices, his first solo exhibition with the gallery.

In Your Distant Voices Alessandro Teoldi uses airplane blankets collected from a friend’s recent trip back home or from strangers on eBay, cut up, reassembled, stitched and stretched over frames. Suspended porcelain figures ground the installation. Each material brings with itself a history, a memory, an energy. Reused, recycled and transformed into delicate meditations. The large stitched works reveal details of gestures; cradled heads, sideways glances, elongated hugs.

In sculptural works, stones are carved from the outline of fingers, traced from where one would place them were you to move them. Hands mythically shape matter into being. Needles puncture blankets, thumbs press clay; chiseling, sculpting, molding, weaving and forging creation: talismans and power objects imbued with energy - the hope of union.

Quilted bodies obscure, repress and reveal a longing for safety and connection. A forest of hands caresses the other, holding or fighting, saving or suffocating? A full body that never materializes, a blanket that changes form, a disappearing touch, time as returning death.

When I say I am lonely enough times, perhaps you will believe there are enough lonely people to no longer feel lonely.

Threads of anguish and ambivalence fray his figurative outlines, context is stripped away. Like singular words in a sentence perspective is suspended, shapeshifting across each work like a love letter. Scratchy black American Airlines and maroon Avianca embraces exaggerate the falsity of corporate security. Brands cannot mother us.

The large figurative quilts repeat, formally drawing attention to subtle differences. Repetition as the continuum of breath, slowing down time, returning to the body; gentle attempts to arrest the collective shame and trauma of displacement. Singular artworks hang side by side, figures both lost and discovered in the chorus, expose the transience of desire.

Teoldi’s pursuit is to disrupt the photographic instant, to prolong the connection. To delicately and intimately stitch bodies together over and over, stretching out time to linger in a touch. The Bressonian ‘decisive moment’ extended in the lengthy act of crafting. Repetition as form, making without care for linearity. Art as pause, as meditation, as a way of conjuring up the impossible, holding the ephemeral for a moment longer, in the body.

-Bridget de Gersigny

Alessandro Teoldi (b. 1987, Milan, Italy) received his MFA from ICP-Bard College in 2013. His practice encompasses textiles, sculpture, drawing and installation. He has exhibited his work at venues including 11 Rivington, NY; Klaus Von Nichtssagend Gallery, NY; Suprainfinit Gallery, Bucharest; Galerie Derouillon, Paris; Viasaterna, Milan; Assembly Room, NY; Camera Club of New York at Baxter St, New York; The Cabin, Los Angeles; International Center of Photography, New York amongst others. He was one of the 2018 residents at La Brea Artist Residency, Los Angeles, CA and a 2015 Workspace residents at Baxter St at The Camera Club of New York. Teoldi lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.