VISCERALITÀ PRIMITIVA

Visceralità primitiva brings together twenty-seven previously unpublished works on paper: a colour series of ten ink drawings and a monochrome series of seventeen works created using the wax pastel technique. These are large-scale works, expansive spaces in which the artist contains and connects a continuum of interrelated themes. At the centre of the project lies the idea of a primitive visceral intensity. The subjects emerge from the artist’s visionary subconscious and erupt through mark and colour.

As Tesi himself writes about the exhibition:
“The surface I use to work on, whatever it may be, is never enough for me: I always go beyond it.

The hand traces yet another mark, which disappears, swallowed by the myriad of sketches drawn just moments before, only for them all together to be absorbed by the sheet. […]

I am voracious. […]

When I begin to draw in the studio, I feel a slight unease spreading through the air; an anxiety takes hold of me and urges me to act. The hand becomes active and, mark after mark, the space fills without hesitation. I move from one sheet to another, yet I do not feel satisfied. Something primitive, inexplicable, and irrational presses in my viscera, searching for a result that satisfies me, for an ideal that may be unattainable.”

This voracity of the mark, this relentless tension towards an elsewhere that continually eludes capture, is what gives form and substance to the entire exhibition project. Visceralità primitiva does not offer a reconciled narrative; rather, it exposes the artistic process itself as a field of conflict, as an unmediated necessity.

The catalogue, published by Edizioni Fondazione POMA Liberatutti in the PomArte series and edited by Marta Convalle, brings together critical contributions by Rosa Pierno and Anna Brancolini.