Todo Ardía (Everything was burning)
Mindy Solomon is pleased to exhibit Argentinian artist Juan Tessi in his solo exhibition: Todo Ardía (Everything was burning). Juan Tessi’s work is an ongoing exploration of the language of painting as it moves from one pictorial support, format, and approach to another. The body is ever present, intersecting reflections on queer desire and the relation between painting and biological processes. Tessi has also explored the tension between craft and technology, approaching painting both as surface and as object, the results being the creation of very personal poetics always grounded in pictorial processes.
For his exhibition, Tessi is showcasing five paintings that highlight his signature figurative images, each portrayed in a variety of poses and gestures. These works evoke a narrative that intertwines elements of flirtation and otherworldliness, creating a captivating interplay between provocation and delight. Each piece is fresh and unique, with the raw canvas serving as a dynamic backdrop against the carefully chosen lines and colors that Tessi masterfully selects.
In the early 2010’s Tessi created a series of enigmatic abstract paintings by listening to an 80’s diva make-up tutorial and following its instructions. In a later series he peeled off the “skins” of paintings, then attached them to stretched raw linens, holding these “skins” against the fabric through the static electricity generated by plexiglass shapes resting on its surface. For his 2016 solo exhibition at MALBA, Tessi presented a two-stage exhibition. During its first weeks, the paintings were placed in unexpected spots within the building: those where surveillance cameras were pointed to, such as the parking lot, the storage facilities, even an outdoor terrace where the works were exposed to rain, sun and wind. The proper exhibition room held a series of monitors showing what the surveillance cameras were recording. The paintings moved into the exhibition hall only during the last weeks of the show. A series developed between 2016 and 2019 treated the canvases as bodies for ceramic heads, which concentrated all of the painterly gestures outside the canvas itself. In recent years Tessi’s exploration has concentrated on the interactions between primed and raw linen areas, line and colored surfaces, abstraction and figuration as well as playful references to the history of western, non-western, contemporary and archaic iconographies.
In an essay about Juan Tessi’s work, curator Javier Villa places his work in a lineage that belongs neither to the “monotheistic” tradition of European Modernism, nor to the impulse towards “anthropophagy” of other Latin American avant-garde movements, meaning art that devoured inheritances and influences from colonizers. Rather than banning the past or engulfing its perceived enemies, Villa sees in Tessi’s pictorial strategies a similar approach to that of ancient Meso American cultures: to incorporate others’ deities into one’s own pantheon in order to become stronger. Tessi’s painting takes temporal and stylistic jumps, from one work to the next or even within each painting, with the self-assurance provided by the ethics of his inclusive pantheon”.
Situated within the context of Contemporary Art, Queer art, and Latin American Post Modernism, Tessi brings a refreshing vision from Argentina to the Miami landscape.
About Juan Tessi
Juan Tessi (Lima, Perú 1972) lives and works in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Tessi studied painting with Ricardo Garabito in 1989 and in 1991 he received a scholarship to study at The Maryland Institute, College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland where he majored in painting in 1994. That same year he participated in the Yale/Norfolk Summer Residence. He returned to Argentina in 1998 where he started participating in solo and groups shows both nationally and abroad. In 2010 he was part of the Beca Kuitca/UTDT.
Selected group shows include: Manifiesto Verde, Cultura Colibrí, Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, BsAs. (2023); Ultramar, Museo Thyseen, Spain (2017); Praising the Surface, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, USA (2016); Empujar un Ismo, Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, Fondo Absolutamente Oscuro del Espacio Libre, Fundación Klemm, Algunos Artistas, Fundación Proa, BsAs. (2013), Plano, Peso, Punto y Medida, UTDT, BsAs.; LXV Salón Nacional de Rosario, Museo Castagnino, Rosario (2011), V Bienal do Mercosul, Brazil (2005). He has shown individually at the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires – MALBA (CAMEO, 2016) and at different galleries in Buenos Aires, Lisbon, Santiago de Chile, Sao Paulo, London and Rotterdam.
