Inner landscapes like mirrors

I care about interiority or the inner life and I care about intimacy and often they feel like two opposites poles, the former either leading to the other or on the contrary, precluding it. I care about the silent monologues that go on in people’s minds and that is so hard to share with others in a meaningful way. Maybe that’s why I love the movie Wings of Desire so much, as the angels have the ability to hear the stream of thoughts and feelings that go on endlessly in people’s minds.

Of course one room where interiority and intimacy meet is a pscychoanalyst’s office. One spills the beans, the other receives it. But it’s one way only.

Another space where both can meet I feel is a gallery space which offers an empty white wall to hang one’s deepest cravings on and hope that some passersby will stop and look.

Recently, the paintings of Shota Nakamura at Clearing and the works of Alessandro Teoldi at Marino Gallery have given me a space to spend time in where interiority and intimacy meet.

Shota Nakamura creates large scale landscapes full of longing that feel like inner landscapes and smaller portraits that read like wistful self-portraits. In one painting of a room looking onto a field and a lake in the distance, a landscape is contained in the upholstery of a chair. Apples are over sized, whereas human anatomy disappears. When I look at these landscapes I feel like entering the mind of the artist and seeing along side them. I see the world in a muted palette of subtle blues and grey and ochres. I am looking at a landscape that is private, dreamlike and serene. In a small interior scene, the painter carefully depicts the final glimmer of sun on a kitchen table at the end of the day, as the faint light hits a beer bottle, a glass, a snack and a hand. Is it the hand of the painter having a snack? The hand of his partner? The hand of a visitor? It will remain anonymous. The shadow of the window is reflected on the shiny table surface. There is a darker square bay the window, maybe a small indecipherable painting hung discreetly. The painting remains full of unknown which makes it all the more alluring.

Shota Nakamura
Window (dusk)
2024
Oil on linen
15 3/4 x 23 5/8 inches
40 x 60 cm

Alessandro Teoldi
Chiaro di luna, 2024
Oil, charcoal, ink, graphite, chalk, fabric and linen collage mounted on linen
22 x 28 inches
55.9 x 71.1 cm

Alessandro Teoldi weaves paintings together. He cuts and glues fragments of painted linens to create the final composition of his works. The effect is delicate and fosters an intense luminosity which took me by surprise. The artist makes seductive collages that seem almost like trompe l’oeils of a painting. Each work is imbued with intimacy: lovers in bed, a male nude seen from the back whose round buttocks is echoed in a moonscape and or a fleshy squash bursting with seeds.

I am captivated by the tenderness, the longing and the intimacy displayed in all these paintings that seem to whisper to each other.

Tender, intimate landscapes have very much been on my mind lately, here is a painting that I have been working on recently in the studio, also an inner landscape of a place I am very familiar with and deeply attached to.

(If you are in NYC, it only takes 10 minutes to walk from one show to the other.)

Shota Nakamura SIGHS at Clearing till 03/01

Alessandro Teoldi DOPO LA PIOGGIA at Marinaro Gallery till Saturday 02/22