Exhibition text for Juan Tessi
Gallery 3+1
2023
The first time I talked to Juan Tessi was through a Whatsapp video call that bridged Lisbon to Buenos Aires, where he lives and creates. The connection kept cutting off, yet we kept on going. We attuned to the rhythm of our voices breaking up and screens freezing. We welcomed interruptions, glitches, delays. Letting go of some words, to let others sink in.
We talked about his sources of inspirations and drives. About makeup tutorials and vintage gay porn movies. About blaming God for the bad and anticipating the worst. About the chaos in nature, rage and fury. About wetlands, lush and love. About how, in one’s mind, environmental questions can cohabit with grocery lists. About how all of this can infuse in the work.
Much like our conversation, Juan Tessi’s process of painting is nonlinear. He doesn’t approach his exhibitions with preset notions but weaves a million threads all at once and allows his works to evolve organically. So most of all, we talked about painting. About being enamored with its uselessness – and its transformative potential. About drawing boundaries and edges, only to then transcend them – and going beyond the canvas, hoping for drips and leaks.
This might sound messy.
And mess was a recurring term in our conversation, to the point that I eventually started to perceive it as a concept deeply tied to his understanding of art making. I contemplated entitling this text "A Theory of Mess" but it eventually seemed that trying to fix any doctrines would clash with the essence of this artist, who distances himself from any systematic approach. Instead, I'd rather engage in a "praise of mess" akin to Jun'ichirō Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows (1933) which showcased the Western fixation on light and clarity against an appreciation of darkness and subtlety. Here a celebration of mess – this sort of human-made wild – would go more against an obsession towards the clean, ordered and measured. It asks: how did mess come to be perceived as a state that needs to be fixed?
That is not to say this is a messy exhibition nor is it an exhibition about mess. This is a vision of mess as a process, unfolding within the studio and allowing for ever-evolving movement of serendipitous connections within and between his works.
The term "mess" traces its origins back to Late Latin "missus," signifying a "course at dinner" and the act of placing something on a table. It evolved into Old French as "mes," meaning a "portion of food." Over time, it expanded to denote a "group dining together" and "mixed food," notably for animals. This led to its usage as a "jumble" or "mixed mass" in the 19th century, when it also came to figuratively represent a "state of confusion" as well as its interpretation as a "condition of untidiness." I love that mess comes from a place that feeds and gathers. It suggests that accepting mess as a process may lead to a practice that inherently simmers and bubbles.
Juan Tessi follows less recipes than spontaneous reactions. He nurtures a taste for the unscripted, the uncharted, constantly challenging himself to break from the familiar and resisting a mechanized mastery of techniques. The artist refrains from labeling this as resistance though, for this word carries a heroic undertone, whereas he fully revels in the wilderness of uncertainty. It's not a deliberate choice; every time he settles into a particular rhythm, he's compelled to disrupt it and embark on something new. Mess would then be more of an evidence, something he can’t get around – or get out of. The very act of painting becomes an energetic force guided by intuition; Wherein change and ambiguity naturally dismantle preconceived frameworks and systems of thoughts. In other words, mess as a process means perpetually reclaiming a key state of amateurism, a way to keep a sense of candor and freshness.
This quest with no direction provokes in him a slight discomfort, a pivotal sentiment of embarrassment in which he finds a unique pleasure. Embracing the fact that finalized outcomes are never guaranteed, Juan Tessi’s artworks persist as works in progress, aligning with a philosophy of returns and detours. He also welcomes metamorphosis. Just as a caterpillar transforms into a butterfly, his paintings evolve, each new iteration emerging from the same spirit, the same hand. Painting, for him, implies releasing a creature into the world, a living, breathing entity.
The outcome is a collection of distinct beings, each charting its own course, paving various paths, untethered by maps. Together they birth a new kind of landscape, neither realist nor abstract. Lines and signs – or lines becoming signs – herald a new (asemic) language, carefully avoiding any specific semantic. Tight curves rubbing shoulders with solid surfaces and dense flat tints; earthy colors and solar hues; cats transforming into trunks under the brush of a grumbling painter; mermaids shape-shifting into shrimps — or the other way around; figures going upstream; anthropomorphic bodies playing hide and seek; torso men, stick men; a vibe of comics and loads of emotions; Aaaaaarghhhhhh — titles as screams; dancing beams of light and banjos; canvases as scores; eyes, locks and holes as notes; strokes planted, poised to burst.
And what about these deities hovering above towering mountains? They appear suspended in the air, seemingly disconnected from the earthly realm below, most likely attaining heightened states of awareness.
These hybrid creations resonate with the world’s whirlwind of complexity. They could embody Edouard Glissant's concepts of "chaos-world" and “all-world” encapsulating the myriad, interwoven, and unpredictable realities born from transcultural interactions. Within this view lies a celebration of the "right to opacity" in a fragmented society (Poétique de la relation, 1999). This poetics of risk and relation invites to dive into thick layers of intricacy rather than succumb to linear comprehension, hierarchical thinking and predictions. Here, we can once more draw parallels to the opacity of messiness, which becomes a compelling exemplar of this chaotic paradigm. Ultimately, bonds form within the exhibition space and craft a coherent yet intangible fabric, on which to project alternative narratives. In this context, choosing dis-order is a turbulent but essential decision, one that has the potential to accept the ineffable and invisible, as well as to generate new worlds through the meeting of different dimensions.
It’s probably no surprise then that, in Spanish — Juan Tessi’s mother tongue — "mess" is referred to as "lío", rooted in the Latin word "ligare", meaning "to bind or unite."