A 'political' practice against realism

The artist's style is abstract and informal, with works that refer to clearly identifiable figurative topics with which the painting is linked in a hypotactic way, sometimes as a linguistic metaphor, or with ambiguous analogy.
The 'Field' for example refers to places of imprisonment and genocide or alternatively to postmodern citations of pictorial passages from the history of art. Not a simple d'après, common to many artists such as Picasso for example, but a political practice against the culture of realism and description put into play by empty actuality. Many topics are covered: from historical events to personal memories through original pictorial interpretations. In some cases, is astonishing the approach to paintings or artists from history such as Monet (Memory of an exhibition by Monet, oil on canvas, 2021) in which he transfigures - as happens in literary works -reality not through 'description', but with shapes and colors, often in open antithesis with the obvious analogies to the model produced by the fetishism of mass culture, devoid of the 'synaesthesia' with which the great artists work instead. Thus some weeds at the borders of the road become an 'Apologia for weeds' or a scribble will be discovered both of the 'Sacred Straw' perhaps referring to the straw mattress of the manger of the Greccio nativity scene. So the title is restored centrality in the work, as happens in contemporary art. All in the admiration of a restless and lyrical gestures at the same time, such that Tedeschini's painting turns out to be an autobiographical document that tears the present with its own experience without dwelling on academicism and the obsolescent stylistic labels that would distance his work from his true sense. Is this a great artist? Surely one who does not like the immediate comprehensibility of common realism that often rhymes with the 'belly' of a country whose history reminds us of something.

The aesthetic gesture and the primordial sign
A meeting with the 'Operae Novae' of Davide Tedeschini. 

article by Davide Miceli, 

curator

Art is a visual experience. Maieutics of thoughts and emotions, generative of gestures. Approaching in to an art work, a bouquet of other senses gradually opens up, unconsciously activating and revitalizing the human root of the encounter with beauty.
There is a moment about the meeting between the work and the gaze in which the expectation merges with reality and then merges and generates infinite new interactions.
The first possible is between the archetypal forms present in our mind and what the artist has imprinted on the canvas. A historical memory inscribed in the unconscious heritage of man and the gesture of the artist, human act qualified by the will to produce a sign .In this frame the anthology of 'operae novae' proposed by Davide Tedeschini is placed in a semantic dialogue between past and present, between memory and actuality, between unconscious and conscience.
To experience his work means to run the risk of an always active process of confrontation between distant and distinct but always communicating dialectical forms.
The atavistic, phenomenal gesture and the noumenal embedded in our intelligibility of the world.
An aesthetic gesture that sinks its morphology into the primordial sign.
Sometimes it is voiced, other times it is veiled, mediated, but always is instinctual. At once it is pondered and immediate. It is Meditated because the mind with its speed imagines to contemplate it but immediately because the hand performs free its creativity by meeting the porosity of the canvas and the viscosity of the color.
Here in Davide Tedeschini's painting the dialogue between man and nature can be felt as in Quercia where the trunk of a carcass is interposed with the tree, of which the ribs remain.
Or like in the corn field where the sturdy cereal stalks can be combined with primordial darts planted in the ground. Even where the theme may appear present the gesture is ancient, original (I would also look at the metaphor of the field as 'lager' and the multitude as 'people' since after the genocides of the 30s there is always this sad legacy in Europe and in the Mediterranean: birds / migrants, ears / darts / stanzialities etc ... ed)
A contemporary journey in the youngest time of humanity, when art was taking its first steps. By showing how the ever-changing artistic process does not forget these origins.
The motive is unchanged. Leave a mark, tell, get your hands dirty and inspire those who will meet those tracks.
If you look carefully, Davide Tedeschini, an eclectic artist able to surprise, follows the course of art over time, with a journey that goes from the body to nature, from man to the other forms of life without ever forgetting the alphabet of emotions that each of us has entered within from his first steps on this world.
A contemporary journey in the youngest time of humanity, when art was taking its first steps. By showing how the ever-changing artistic process does not forget these origins.
The motive is unchanged. Leaving a mark, telling, getting your hands dirty and inspiring who will meet those tracks.
If you look carefully, Davide Tedeschini, an eclectic artist able to surprise, follows the course of art over time, with a journey that goes from the body to nature, from man to the other forms of life without ever forgetting the alphabet of emotions that each of us has entered within from his first steps on this world.
Painting is a possible answer to all the existential needs that accompany humanity: who are we? Where are we going?
We are the authors of those signs, accompanied by the same fears, the same hopes. We are moving towards a future of which we only make forecasts.
We have no consolidated certainties. Only convictions. In a high complexity society, in which the language has increased his horizons and the communications became much more difficult, the simplicity of the artistic signs of Davide Tedeschini seems to be able to reassure: universal traits, signs understandable in the Babel of the hyper-communication.
They stop the flow, there let us to go more fast forward. And in the meantime they induce a quick and not foregone reflection: do we still know how to look?
The answer is the question that remains open to the choice of the user.
Art has an aesthetic and a social function.
Beauty and the community. The taste and the meeting. Sharing, dialogue, recognition. Activate continuous processes.
The path is long and marked by various steps, by continuous choices, always by frequent possibilities: eyes, mind and heart are needed.
At the bottom every time that the day ends, you just want to reassure your own shelter and, like in 'way back home', every detail leads back to our original refuge: yesterday a cave, today a building where artworks can remind us of this path .

The substance in a chaotic world

Davide Tedeschini's painting

text by Emanuela Muccigrosso
Art historian

Davide Tedeschini's painting represents an opportunity to face contemporary art not only in its final product, the painting, but above all in its manifestation of biographical experiences, the stratification over the years. So strong is the aesthetic impact that an immediate reading we could give to it a definition of 'brutal', which evokes the recent experiences typical of Art Brut. He looks like the 'wild' painting and for this reason he can bring us to mind the currents of French and German Expressionism, but we must also included the European group CO.BR.A among the influences, in particular the figure and the artworks of Jorn, in which there is a total freedom of expression and colors emphasized by the body of the brushstroke. As a teacher, Tedeschini also worked on journalism and writing, dedicating in some essays on the actuality of the artistic environment and perhaps it is in this case that we find some keys to understand this painting that hardly finds references in those contemporary paintings experiences, rich in figuration or even quotation and antiquarian mannerisms, which to the expert eye appear as market products with respect to the painting in question. So, to be honest, this painting can not be understood with the simple juxtaposition or discovering painting references or historicized art; but more simply, it is something that finds its intrinsic originality at the moment.The juxtaposition of today's world with that of Europe in the 1930s is not relevant to an artist who has never been seduced by commercial sales proposals.
Of the twenty works in 2018, fourteen are huge tables, with warm but intense, communicative colors. Characterized also by themes and representative intentions different from each other. We move from the material, to the colorist violence, perhaps of Art Brut, to synthesis up to the abstract. Everything happens gradually, without frightening the observer, as if to recreate a nuance of his stylistic change over the years. It allows us to enter his daily life, in his tormented past and in the landscapes heavily hinted at by large tracts of color, as in the case of "Village at the bottom of the valley" , show the use of hands in rolling out the color. "Carcass", in which there are two bones in the foreground and two dark figures in the dim light. The trio "Still Life with Thistles" , "Work in the Fields" and "Laid Table" instead represents a chaotic set of elements, in fact the Horror vacui of this group.
From the almost obsessive mania to reproduce as many forms as possible, we move on to the almost total synthesis of both the shape and color of "Seagulls" , "Lettuce" and "Wheat fields" . The synthesis of these tables compared to the previous ones affects as much as the close-up effect of the elements depicted, as if the artist was painting through a magnifying glass.
There are many abstract elements. In the "House by the sea" we have only short brushstrokes that only bring us back to the title of the painting, but it is in the two tables entitled "Freedom" and "Europe" that abstraction is able to emerge in its technicalities. Looking at the two works, whose main characteristic is the frenetic juxtaposition of dense stains of color, we can not but recall the very early beginnings of Kandinsky's success.
The Roman artist has made a journey, a path that led him to achieve a line between the figurative and the abstract, with a special expediency to the minimalism in the three huge canvases that make up the strong point of the whole collection . We see it more in " Wheat field" and "Seagulls" rather than in "Oak tree", in which continues the work of sinthesis and gives us an effect of further enlargement of vision of the object in question. However, a major evolutionary contribution of his style is the bichromatic use of black and white.
He approaches Franz Kline who paints white and black, emphasizing the abstraction of the line, disregarding the form, Keith Haring, who in the body art black & white gave a representative example of technical primitivism. But these are the contemporary expressions that interest me: in the 2017 Venice Biennale, the pavilions of Argentina, Italy, and Russia used white as a strong and effective form of expression. The Mexican pavilion, on the other hand, through the contrast between these two basic tones has created a new language.
We have a form, we perceive it, we understand it, but it is reduced to extreme essentiality. As if we were to observe the substance, the essentiality of things, of the elements, in this case of the nature. A return to the primordiality of art. The white of the canvas is the contemporary support alternative to the wall of the cave, black is the material through which to impress an idea of ​​what comes to the mind of the artist.
And it is primordial painting that is Tedeschini's primary objective. The arrival to total abstraction can be translated into the search for the childish and spontaneous pictorial trait. The painter wants to recover the immediate communicability of simplicity ending a path that has led him to take often inspiration from the twentieth century avant-gardes, aiming concretely at abstraction, but at the same time he does it in a personal and original way..