Maddalena Tesser

“It's about 'embroidering' a piece of canvas,” says Maddalena Tesser (Vittorio Veneto, Treviso, 1992) about painting, which, on the other hand, she conceives as a practice more related to thought than to gesture: a medium that transports one elsewhere and has the power to hold something magical. And this is, in fact, what the female figure portrayed in the work in competition, entitled Il mondo (The World), seems to suggest, lying with her eyes closed in a placid lagoon landscape, suspended between reality and dream. The image emerges from various layers of material, distributed first by spatula then by brush. This type of processing amplifies the overall textural effect, making the texture of the underlying canvas invisible and rather indulging the illusion of a wall painting, to which the color, derived from a mixture of pigments with linseed oil and Bologna chalk, also contributes. The meticulousness of the technical process is counterpointed by formal simplification, with outcomes of essentiality that take inspiration from ancient painting as well as from the natural world, eliminating all decorative elements and pretexts for complexity, “because what is not needed,” Tesser explains, “must be left aside.” The intent is to recalibrate the composition by means of “purer images, capable of striking for the emotions they release,” and to trace, in this way, the meaning of being human.
“It is a simple and complex work, new and old, bright and melancholy, and in its duality it speaks of life, of the balance between the world within us and outside us.”