Details
Author
Biason, Mario Teleri
Publishers
San Francisco : East Side Editions,
Description
In very good condition. With dedication. Bilingual: English-Italian - Mario Teleri Biasoris greatest appeal lies in his rejection of the power play that affects so much of the contemporary art world. Gifted with an extraordinary technical capacity and artistic sensitivity, this modem peintre-graveur works alone, focused on experimenting with the most varied materials and "fusing'them onto his surfaces, each material coexisting within the space around it. The artist's own concept is based on an understanding of art as a continual experimentation with techniquesand processes. Indeed his materials are always a means to an end: the search for light and transparency. These are a constant part of the painter's creative process as he seeks to produce forms that are simultaneously material and immaterial and which are expressed and become concrete in their relation to the most impalpable atmospheres. In his works of the 1980's and1990's there appears a two-dimensional rigour, as colour imposes itself in a measured way onto geometrically laid out spaces. Yet simplicity of form is contrasted on most occasions with the creative tension of the artist, whose most felicitous pieces emerge with great authority. I am thinking here of works such as Saint Sebastian (1988) or Presences (1996), executed with the composite techniques of latex paint, gold leaf, rope, elm burl, and poplar plywood, very diverse materials that evoke the symbols always present in the work of Teleri Biason, who always underlines the connection between the present day and tradition. His materials are therefore bearers of meaning in themselves, capable of creating powerful images that become alive at the slightest gleam, resulting in a play of light and shade where both appearance and reality are indistinguishable from what has just been evoked. Ancient memories and archaic symbols coexist with simple phenomena brought to life by the artist as he thinks of distant worlds. Starting in the 1990's, his use of copper and gold leaf-steeped in meaning- becomes a recurring element, as in Shroud (1990), the Portrait of Oiram Nosaib (1992), or the large Triptych (2001). These series of lines and gleams of light overlay and intersect one other on wooden surfaces, folding twisting and simultaneously producing luminous effects of varying intensity, colour, and duration. The surrounding atmosphere is so expansive and ambiguous that the large area around the forms becomes a conceptual space reflecting the artist's characteristic method of creating images by "selective application". Over the years Teleri Biason has returned to the marble surfaces of Saint Mark's, reducing them to structurally simple signs. They are almost abstract representations that flow like a narrative, or a sort of mysterious writing that the artist seeks to decipher and "capture" by closely following the infinite path of lines printed with silkscreen. Here, the artist's process consists of consuming and purifying matter in order to create a sort of mental alphabet that leads the viewer to reflect on the endless possibilities of perception provoked by an ever-present flow of energy, at once visible and invisible. His geometric forms thus refer to infinite space, and they represent a time long gone that contains all the poetry of the places evoked by these forms.