MATTEO TENARDI
STUDIES FOR A BATTLE SCENE
Critical text by Simona Bartolena
From 28 September to 30 November 2024
The gallery is open from Tuesday to Friday from 5:30 pm to 8 pm | Saturday from 3 pm to 7 pm and by appointment

Villa Contemporanea is pleased to present Studies for a Battle Scene by Matteo Tenardi.
A figurative painter, Matteo shows remarkable technical ability and ranges from drawing on paper to shaped wood work. A virtuoso in drawing, he always starts from a sketch to arrive at the three-dimensional and installation work.
His is a painting that reveals itself layer upon layer and manifests itself as a reminiscence: his figures seem to live in the dimension of memory, crystallized in the immobility of a moment preserved in a personal thought, a fragment of memory.
The constant of Tenardi’s pictorial cycles is the relationship between man and space: his characters are always captured in the act of making a gesture, they go beyond physical space and reach out towards the viewer.
In this new cycle, fragments of figures throw stones, try to build shelters, show their backs trying to escape. The battle to which the title refers is against time and its slow oblivion; throwing a stone thus becomes a gesture of defiance, the memory of a primary gesture.
“The images, like stones thrown into history, travel through time through fragments, enigmas and unsaid things and carry traces that settle in memory. “Studies for a battle scene” also wants to be this, a census of fragmentary gestures, in search of a return or a revolt”, this is how the artist describes his work.
Simona Bartolena writes in the critical text that accompanies the exhibition: “His figures throwing stones already had the character of fighters. These were just stones, however, litomachies, as the artist himself had defined them: stones thrown with gestures with multiple meanings and implications. Here, instead, Tenardi imagined a real battle, like those painted by the genre painters of the seventeenth century: not "that" battle, but "a" battle, even if it never existed, even if only imagined, almost a pretext to stage bodies, horses, landscapes, spears, perspectives...
In line with this imagery, Tenardi built his own battle, composing it with his unmistakable figures, who for the occasion have dressed in clothes that move them in an indefinite space-time and have lost their recognizable individuality: their faces have partially disappeared, corroded to the point of becoming fragments, their bodies are painted in monochrome, almost like a drawing managed with the brush".
We are spectators of a great fresco in progress: the figures, which protrude from the wall, capture our gaze and place us in front of a battle that already in the corroded and fragmented panels suggests the eternal struggle against time.