Tiepido Cool All Over Helsinki

TIEPIDO COOL is an editorial project conceived by artist Davide D’Elia and realised by Viaindustriae publishing curated by Elisa Del Prete and Silvia Litardi of NOS Visual Arts Production. The artist’s research flows into a narrative articulated on the basis of the poetic criterion introduced by the title. The two words, Tiepido, Italian, and Cool, English, guide the succession of works in a visual progression that introduces sources, forms, materials and moods from which they originate: a path that privileges the perceptive experience rather than the chronological-biographical one. The book attempts to unravel the complexity of a path that on the one hand welds together his two souls, of artist and visual designer, and on the other is articulated in the space-time comparison of the two places that D’Elia has inhabited and experienced as key parts of his training: London and Rome. Perceived by the artist as antithetical, the two capitals become the two extremities of a discourse that converges at the centre, highlighting the duality on which his work hinges: while the ‘warmer’ works investigating the organic nature of matter (the works in which he cultivates moulds, such as Family, 2007, or the wallpapers removed in Louise, 2006-2011) sediment in the ‘cold’ London environment, vice versa those perceived as ‘cold’, right up to his most recent Fresco series, belong to the ‘Roman period’; at the centre is a cycle of works in which D’Elia takes on the lexicon of the buoy as the objectification of this necessary coexistence of two extremities.
The book opens with the “Colour Gradient” section, a flow of mainly photographic images of the artist, an antechamber to enter the actual body of works that follows; the second section, “Constellations”, collects the texts by Elisa Del Prete and Mike Watson, the two authors invited to intervene with two previously unpublished texts, the result of their respective critical investigations and dialogue with the artist from different perspectives – and latitudes -: Elisa Del Prete follows D’Elia’s work “closely”, frequenting his studio and always entering into close contact with the works (she curated the solo exhibitions Ri0 – ex-electrofonica, Rome, 2021 – and FRESCO – Museo Davia Bargellini, Bologna, 2022), while Mike Watson, an interpreter of the Anglo-Saxon approach to art-historical studies, engages in a dialogue with the artist “from afar”, starting from his research on Walter Benjamin’s thought and the current effects on the relationship between culture and new media. The narrative path continues with “From Sant’Arcangelo to Apnea”, the section with the catalogue of the artist’s works from 2005 to the present day: also in this more technical section, the works ideally follow the progression from “warm” to “cold”, not chronologically, with the inclusion of “emotional captions” by the artist, who is also the author of the last section “Pictograms”: here, the juxtapositions of symbols function as visual legends that visualise the dialectical mechanism at the basis of his production.
The project is supported by Italian Council (X ed., 2021), project of the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture for the production, knowledge and dissemination of creation contemporary Italian in the field of visual arts; coordinated and produced by Nosadella.due, curated by Elisa Del Prete and Silvia Litardi (NOS Visual Arts Production), in collaboration with Viaindustriae publishing and <rotor> Center for Contemporary Art (Graz); cultural partners: Musei Civici d’Arte Antica | Settore Musei Civici Bologna (Museo Davia Bargellini, Bologna); MAXXI, Museo delle Arti del XXI Secolo (Roma); Myymälä2 Gallery (Helsinki); Centre for Poetic Innovation, Universities of Dundee and St Andrews (St Andrews); Cultural Center GRAD (Belgrado).
Program
March 9th, Tiepido Cool All Over St Andrews, Center for Poetic Innovation, Universities of St Andrews (UK).
March 15th, Tiepido Cool All Over Rome, MAXXI, Museo delle Arti del XXI Secolo, Rome (IT).
April 5th, Tiepido Cool All Over Milan, TRIENNALE, Milan (IT).
April 18th, Tiepido Cool All Over Helsinki, online presentation at Myymälä2 Gallery, Helsinki (FI).
April 27th – May 1st, Tiepido Cool All Over Belgrade, Cultural Center GRAD, Belgrade (RS).
Visit: www.nosproduction.com/tiepidocool
Davide D’Elia (Cava de’ Tirreni, 1973) lives and works in Rome. His poetics may be linked to the observation of time, to the compromises that can apparently be made with the inexorability of its passing, to the possibility of retracing it or even freezing it. Although Davide D’Elia started out in informal painting, from the second half of the 2000s, he began to experiment with the interaction between atmospheric agents and artefacts, creating works composed of degraded materials, made up of shadows and traces of microorganisms, such as moulds. Since 2014, he has used a diametrically opposite material: antifouling paint, exploited in the nautical field to prevent mould, fungi and bacteria from affecting the submerged parts of boats and floating objects. The artist intervenes on objects of memory such as old paintings, tapestries and environments by covering them with ‘faux-natural blue iris’. This material, which has a colour of its own, is first and foremost an action and the promise of its effect: to preserve the existing, to block entropy and the spoiling of time. He began working as a visual designer in the 1990s, moving to London in 2007 where he began to experiment with his artistic poetics thanks to his creative collaboration with the curatorial collective CosmicMegaBrain. He has participated in several international exhibitions including: Beyond Existence, Cordy House, London, 2009; Every Other Day, Zico House, Beirut, 2009; DrawMusicDraw, Booze Cooperativa, Athens, 2008; Booze Around Light Bulbs, Heimatmuseum, London, 2013. His works have been exhibited, among solo and group exhibitions, in museums and institutional venues such as MAXXI, Museum of 21st-Century Art, Rome, 2012–2013; Nell’Acqua capisco, fringe event 55th Venice Biennale, Procuratie Vecchie, Venice, 2013; American Academy, Rome 2014; Artsiders, Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria, Perugia, 2014; Horizontal, Casa Italia (Giochi Olimpici), Rio De Janeiro, 2016; Sensibile Comune, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome, 2017. Finalist Premio Lissone 2018, MAC Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Lissone, 2018; FRESCO, Museo Davia Bargellini, Bologna 2022.
Elisa Del Prete (Bologna, 1978) is an author, curator and producer in the field of visual art. From 2006 to 2016 she directed Nosadella.due in Bologna: a residency programme for artists and curators through which she created a network of international partners and institutions for the production of new works, mostly in public spaces, by guest artists like Nico Dockx, André Guedes, Jukka Korkeila, Soren Lose, Beatrice Catanzaro, Andrea Nacciarriti, Fucking Good Art, Kalin Serapionov, Margherita Moscardini, Aleksandrjia Ajdukovic, Emilio Fantin, Luca Bertolo, Aleksandra Stratimirovic and Bridget Baker. In 2018, together with Silvia Litardi, she transformed Nosadella.due into NOS Visual Arts Production: a design, production and promotion studio for contemporary art to support artists creating new and complex art projects for specific contexts (nosproduction.com). Since 2004, she has written texts for catalogues and exhibitions, and she has collaborated with art magazines and newspapers, such as Arte e Critica and doppiozero.com.
Niels Righolt has been the CEO of The Danish Centre for Arts & Interculture CKI since 2011. CKI is a knowledge, competence and communication centre for international culture, cultural diversity and audience engagement and development. CKI have 25+ years of experience in performing tasks and screenings, skills development programmes, audience and organisational learning, seminars, conferences, workshops, knowledge programmes and projects in Denmark, the Nordics and in Europe. Before joining CKI Niels has worked as Artistic and Managing Director, Producer, Head of Information and Political Advisor within a variety of cultural institutions, public bodies and organisations over the years e.g. Dunkers Kulturhus, Helsingborg (SE). At present Niels is vice-president for Culture Action Europe in Brussels (BE) and he is a board member of a.o. the Voksenåsen Course Centre in Oslo (NO), Teatergrad in Copenhagen (DK) and chair of the board for CommunityKulturCentrum in Malmö (SE).
Mike Watson (London, 1979), based in Finland, is a theorist, critic and curator who largely deals with the relationship between art, new media and politics. After completing a research doctorate in philosophy at Goldsmiths College, he has written for Art Review, Artforum, Frieze, Hyperallergic and Radical Philosophy, and has curated events at the 55th and 56th Venice Biennale as well as Manifesta 12. With ZerO Books in 2019 he published a book entitled Can the Left Learn to Meme?: Adorno, Video Gaming, and Stranger Things and in 2021 The Memeing of Mark Fisher: How the Frankfurt School Foresaw Capitalist Realism. He taught as an adjunct professor at two American universities in Rome between 2015 and 2018, while he is currently a visiting professor in Critical Theory and Communication at European and American colleges, as well as teaching regularly at the Oulu University in Finland.
NOS Visual Arts Production, Bologna (Italy) is the curatorial board of the cultural association Nosadella.due. An unprecedented element that atypically inserts itself into the current art system, bringing together the concreteness of the producer with the sensitivity of the curator to create new artistic works in original and unusual contexts. NOS came into being in 2018 from the experience of the two curators Elisa Del Prete and Silvia Litardi to bring out and address the many aspects that make the creation of a work of art possible, from the design phase in dialogue with the artist, to the human, cultural and operational relationships that concern the production of projects in specific contexts, right through to its promotion and documentation.