source: lambertoteotino

Born in Italy, lives and work in Rome. Is specialised in the visual arts, where his investigation is mainly developed by analyzing the nature of the image and its perceptual mechanisms. The use of photography, technical and conceptual actions using archival images, employing a philosophical approach to the image in the form of visual installations are the main features of his work. Philosophers (William of Ockham), mathematicians (René Descartes), or anonymus figures (Luther Blissett) inform his work. To the artist what matters is the dissemination of meaning, paradox, the conditions of perceptive alteration and a new conceptual design. A kind of displacement metaphysical, or deviation. As regards the practical aspect, Teotino analyzes the development and deepening of adopted language, be it photographic, installation or retrieved images, with the purpose of diverting the possibilities of the instrument itself to new technical applications. In close correlation with this process is the emphasis placed on thought within the work, in which the investigation of the figure shows a conceptual outcome as the result of historical idiosyncrasies which concern philosophy on the one hand and science on the other, as the social and paranormal aspects of man are investigated. In 2012 Eyemazing Printed Magazine, winner of the prestigius “Lucie Awards”, publish the project sistema di riferimento monodimensionale (one-dimensional coordinate system), which in 2011 received a special mention from the jury of Talent Prize, In the same year he declined an invitation to participate in the Italian pavilion of the 54th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale for the 150th anniversay of Italian unification, curated by Vittorio Sgarbi.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
source: elitismstyle

STATEMENT:

The one-dimensional coordinate system which gives its name to the title of the project, is a theorem invented by Rene Descartes ( La Haye en Touraine, March 31, 1596 – Stockholm, February 11, 1650), French philosopher and mathematician, considered one of the greatest founders of modern philosophy and the father of modern mathematics.
We consider the reference system, the set of references used to locate the position of an object in space, consisting of a straight line, on which an object is bound to move.
Depending on the number of references, we can talk about a:
– one-dimensional coordinate system (1D)
– two-dimensional coordinate systems (2D)
– three-dimensional coordinate systems (3D)
The research for this project concerns not so much the analysis of the algebraic theorem, but attempts to reformulate the antithesis between science and paranormal phenomenon in which, through a clear digital action, defined as ‘picture leak’, the movement takes shape within the space of a Cartesian axis. Thereby a visual result is determined in which only a specific portion (along a straight line) of the picture disappears, while the rest of the space, in this case a photographic space, remains unchanged. The image freezes, it is subjected to a deviation (a loss of temporality) and the suspended axis in the “photographic scene”, along which the picture disappears, becomes the third element, the one-dimensional element that closes the “The Devil’s Triangle” in conjunction with the physical / visual three-dimensional space of the viewer, the two-dimensional space of photography and the one-dimensional coordinate system.
The project consists of approximately 20 photographic works in b / w and presents vintage pictures taken from digital archives.

txt by Luca Panaro

The nature of the image and its hidden perceptual mechanisms constitute the main field of research for Italian artist Lamberto Teotino. His photographs reveal an effort to bring physical issues to the forefront. These material, almost sculptural, images are constantly kept together by a strong tension of opposites and betray all the work required for staging the scene. Teotino’s search for truth arises from its possible negation and such a moment of crisis – a rupture in the linear unfolding of events – corroborates the architecture of the artist’s thought founded upon the belief that doubting, in keeping with Descartes’ methodological skepticism, constitutes the right attitude towards research. The method of doubt is the acid test of knowledge as it puts our beliefs on trial in order to determine what is and what isn’t true.

Instead of realizing a conventional photographic series, Teotino chooses to work with archival images in his last project, Sistema di riferimento monodimensionale (2011), an approach common to many artists since the 1980s that has been defined “An Archival Impulse” by Hal Foster (2004) and “Archive Fever”, after Jacques Derrida’s renowned essay, by Okwui Enwezor (2008). Photography, as well as cinema, TV, and most recently the World Wide Web, constitute prime sources for artists to draw upon in their work as their urgency to confront knowledge from the past keeps growing.

For instance, the use of found and “recycled” images is recurrent in the work of German artist Joachim Schmid who in 1989, on occasion of the 150th anniversary of photography’s invention, defiantly stated: «No new photographs until the old ones have been used up!». His work as a “non photographer” involves collecting, sorting out, rearranging and finally displaying other people’s photographs. Working with hundreds of discarded portraits that a studio photographer had cut in two in order to prevent further commercial use, Schmid created original images by the combination of the two halves (Photogenic Draft, 1991).Schmid’s project is analogous to Teotino’s in several ways. Both artists inject a new life in black and white photographic series otherwise doomed to trash bins or archival drawers. Another similarity between the two artists’ works can be found in the vertical cut that severs each photograph, a disruption in the regular compositional balance of the scene. The photographs of Schmid and Teotino allow contrasting forces to coexist in the same image all the while telling stories about identity and past times.

The awareness that society was shaping up around an immense media archive, especially a photographic one, arose already in the 1960s when an artist such as Andy Warhol begun to use pre-existing and “cult” images and through their enlargement and serialization he transformed Hollywood’s divas, dictators, canned food, and car crashes in works of art. If Warhol’s archive was made of images, years before the archive of Duchamp had been made of objects, the acclaimed ready-mades. This provides evidence that art has taken over the logic of the archive since the beginning of the twentieth century. By selecting industrial products in common use, Duchamp simply signaled that ready-made objects like a bicycle wheel, a bottle rack, a snow shovel, and a porcelain urinal are works of art. Also Picasso made his own discreet contribution to this cause with the collages he realized using all sorts of everyday objects that could be glued on the canvas like newspaper cuts, musical scores, and pieces of wallpaper. Picasso improves this invention and steers further away from the conventional values of painting by incorporating a piece of oilcloth with a chair caning pattern in his Still-life with chair caning (1912). With its frame made of actual rope, the painting presents pre-existing materials directly on the canvas instead that evocating their presence through pictorial representation.

Although short and incomplete, this digression in the history of art allows us to show that with its multiple facets and interpretations the art from the last century has created a new “symbolic form”, a unique and radical aesthetic shift based on the possibility to produce an original artwork, albeit not necessarily a new one, by making use of archival images. In the same way as Ervin Panofsky (1927) maintained that linear perspective has been the dominant symbolic form from the Renaissance to Impressionism, the archive can be considered the symbolic form, the new conception of space of the contemporary age, that is from the historical avant-gardes to the present. As of now, the acceptance of such a new mode of art making is so widespread that the Hasselblad Foundation could award its prestigious prize to artist Walid Raad, who is not a photographer, for generating original ideas about the relationship between documentary photography, archive, and history. Lamberto Teotino’s practice belongs to the cultural context developed in the last decades. He shares the international interest about archival probing and yet provides his own personal version of this language by steering it towards new conceptual shores, exploring social and paranormal issues concerning the individual. Technological progress is the main subject of Teotino’s images and his machines bring to mind the proto-computers craftily forged by Polish artist Robert Kusmirowski. The Italian artist’s photographs show refined and gracefully posed men from a recent past in the act of making their contribution to science, education, and justice. Yet, something supernatural keeps lingering around his pictures as they appear to be the result of an abrupt and unexpected transmission loss: the artist makes us believe that his subjects underwent a spatio-temporal shift almost as if a system crash had altered the conventional order of things.

In his photographs Teotino refers the one-dimensional coordinate system developed by Descartes in which one object is bound to move on a straight line. The digital manipulation of archival pictures generates a shift of the Cartesian axis on the surface of the image in such a way that while one part of the photograph vanishes all along the straight line, the other remains unaltered. Although we cannot determine which one constitutes the fixed point, what is most significant is that the beholder is induced to believe that only one side of the image has been altered. Teotino operates with high precision making use of the sharpest available razor, meaning not the technical instrument but the methodological principle conceived by William of Ockham, the English Franciscan friar and philosopher. Ockham’s razor states the uselessness of all theories that are not strictly necessary. The metaphor of the razor substantiates the idea that blades must cut everything superfluous away. In the instantiation of this principle, Teotino also appropriates Mies Van der Rohe’s maxim “less us more”. The artist takes information away from the image without disrupting its compositional balance, the photographs maintain their formal accuracy and preserve the old-fashioned elegance of their subjects while featuring, at the same time, the renewed conceptual aesthetics that characterizes the series as a whole.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
source: artribune

L’immagine ritrovata è il punto di partenza dell’ultima fatica di Lamberto Teotino, “Sistema di riferimento monodimensionale”.

Appartengono al passato le immagini di Lamberto Teotino (Napoli, 1974), scatti in bianco e nero che celebrano piccole e grandi conquiste di uomini operosi, selezionati attraverso una minuziosa ricerca negli archivi web. L’artista infligge a queste testimonianze un taglio chirurgico, un prelievo monodimensionale di quella realtà impressa sulla lastra fotografica che, pur mantenendo l’equilibrio e il gusto vintage della composizione, ci pone di fronte a una nuova spiazzante immagine. L’interruzione di comunicazione visiva lungo la linea retta fa vacillare l’evidenza della realtà, generando un gap tra le certezze di quegli uomini in posa di fronte all’obiettivo e il disorientamento di chi osserva gli stessi eventi in differita. Scorrendo con lo sguardo le fotografie, scandite da un attento allestimento, continuiamo a visualizzare lo stesso enigma, un disturbo spazio-temporale che vale la pena osservare dal vivo.
.
.
.
.
.
.
source: dinomorraartecontemporaneaeu

Lamberto Teotino (Napoli, 1974) vive e lavora a Roma. Si diploma all’Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia. La sua indagine si sviluppa principalmente sull’analisi e la natura dell’immagine, esaminando i suoi meccanismi percettivi. Le caratteristiche principali dell’opera sono l’utilizzo della fotografia, gli interventi tecnico-concettuali su immagini d’archivio e gli approcci filosofici dell’immagine in forma di comunicazione visivo-installativa. Per quanto concerne l’aspetto pratico, la sua ricerca analizza lo sviluppo e l’approfondimento del linguaggio, adottato con lo scopo di dirottare le possibilità dello strumento stesso verso nuove applicazioni tecniche. Nel 2012 la rivista Eyemazing, vincitrice del prestigioso premio “Lucie Awards”, pubblica il progetto Sistema di riferimento monodimensionale, con il quale nel 2011 Lamberto Teotino riceve anche la menzione speciale della giuria del Talent Prize.