(from Werner Bertolotti’s article)

I think of Primo Levi and of a meeting narrated in «The Truce». That trip, which seemed to me, a reader, a roaming of Ulysses, but measured in oceans of land, had a stop in a country always in the north of the Black Sea. And again in the market, at the end of the Second World War, they, the survivors of the extermination, and Primo Levi with them, come down into this ancient land of primal instincts, wars and poetry, like hungry wolves on a merchandise day. But Primo Levi, blooming to his own soul, sees a blind singer and stops charmed to listen…. it was in 1946.

Then my mind goes to a story by Indro Montanelli (unjustly known just as a journalist) who, before the Second World War, on the back of a mule, chalenges the mountains to talk to «the blind» know as the most popular voice from Albania. Indro arrives and reveals that the blind is not blind. Having asked for an explanation, he finds out that «the blind» is a poet and that it doesn’t matter if his eyes see.

Here you are. Who hadn’t the gift of eyes, looked inside himself and found the voice of the muses, living on a mountain at the bottom of the Balkans. Or otherwise… in isolation, like in confinement, since he had to do neither crafts nor war nor sacrifices, he found a voice in the silence, when he was accustomed to his heartbeat, to the tic toc of the flesh which governs us, which seems our god even though it isn’t. It is in the silence of the community work, in the silence of the endocrine system and the rushing current of the blood that one starts hearing a fragile and subtle song, which scares first. That song has a deep rhythm of the whole existences, a total formula of the beginning of beginnings, and does not require comrehension, but dedication. Like a woman, once a mother, feels justified and realised against nature, the artist, whether a singer or a painter, if transcribes that music, even if
never accurately, will know to have become a living part of the soul of the world. There is the sacred, but without God, there is love, but without flesh, and all that happens is imperfectly beautiful.

An Italian goblin, Tonino Guerra, took my hand and led me among those streets, between the poetry which seems to be waiting for you behind every corner, like when in Prague I always feel a step away from Kafka. I saw her first with his eyes of a poet, and then with my own, and now I always expect interesting pieces from that land. When in Moscow I learned that even the nation which always rush, occasionally turn and look behind the magic smokes of Colchis and wait for the artist.

And here are Teni’s «cards». I had seen them before in the e-mail. A slow adventure, made of days and days of immersion. First a dozen of pieces, then the next day other paintings, then some little break to allow maturing slowly, not with the pace of our era, without polluting it with rationalism.

Sacred symbols, with no suffering of the death, which would make them black. Symbols, which a European like me, would know to unroll and read with a certain immediacy, but then would stumble, must stumble … and must fail to understand. That is the beauty of her art. You won’t understand them right away, neither tonight at home during that breif moment, which you devote only to yourself! But you have them inside yourself now, they have entered the favorite room of your memory, dwell there and let you return and look at them. You learn that, like Borges said, today the beauty is common, whatever is worth being remembered would be placed in the favorite room of your cranial temple and would be anchored in the depth, into something deep in us, of us, we do not know what, but which… we know, is ours. For instance, we know to have the guts, but in everyday life we are not conscious of it, and if it gets sick, we leave it to a specialist to attempt a restoration. But it is a piece of the body! In fact it’s a part of our self and if it does not work well, we are sad, just like the bile makes us angry, but … what about the inner self? That intangible enticed into the tangible, the thing that I know I›m, but when hurrying I forget to comprise…? Where would I find that self? May it be that in the depth of myself there is something I›m involved in, a self that whispers, that goes beyond the insult of a mirror, that always sings and never abandons me, if I decide to listen? Can you imagine the loneliness of your death, if you have neglected your self? Have you ever tried to understand it? Have you ever let the inner self lead you? How many people die in this extreme solitude; without any self! But imagine a sagging flesh, a crumbling shell and that something, which sings inside of you, disappearing in infinity, devouring it, and that’s the only thing you really are, the seed, which nourishes the images, which remain in your mind despite the beauty. That seed, which captures and invites you to search, in the art, the reflection of the seed of the artist inspired by it! Because a true artist reaches his/her own self and listens to it, and now I›ll reveal you – the inner self is one sole, shared by all. That’s why in a true «journey» into the art you can find yourself, but also the other one, the artist … and this can happen every time you want it.

I can imagine the initial disorientation of an honest customer walking in the exhibition of Teni’s paintings. I imagine him honest, I mean without narcissistic attitudes of the twentieth century, which are commonly called intellectual, and which are nothing for the nucleus of a self considered immovable for those who surf on the surface. That nucleus is probably the God, our personal god, the pure ego that we admire, first bewildered and then in love. The nucleus that shines, attracts, warms and precedes the thought in the essence, which does not trigger the senses, but alerts them and makes them very sensitive. When we have reached or at least tried to reach the core of ourselves, only then all that our senses, touch, smell, sight reveal to us, become natural fields to strip and chew at the rhythm of the inner music, which we don’t want any more to harness, but to listen to and to put in notes, in colors, in words. I imagine him like that, this very human one, the honest one, who walks in front of the paintings, because the rest is dust, is a body that passes, an absence that derails into nothing.

In Teni I find this vastness. The symbol is present and reveals itself immediately. The body, for example, almost asexual, that reveals being male or female by trifle details only, entrusts proper identity not to the flesh. Are you a man or a woman, apart of the sexuality? Can you be? Is there a possibility? For Teni there is. She exhibits, but does not reveal. As in the oldest fairy tales, in the forest (forest of a body and of trees – hormones) you might be lost, but in the end there is a light that you can follow and there will be some peace and perhaps an answer. And surfing among the paintings, occasionally deviated by the venom of the intellect, which we were taught to use always, even in the feelings … I understand that it has a taste, perhaps, a taste of recent and ancient surrealistic paintings. I smell of Hieronymus Bosch, without any scientific certainty, «feel» the sick surrealists of Freudianism, and then get seduced by a masquerade of colors, which destabilizes, because it dwindles into nothing in the present, which you’ve just left outside of the art gallery. It’s another world, a new world, more sensed than our haste, where the noise obeys and disappears at the order, and in the silence of our steps becomes the music of intuition. I feel it is a truth that I share, but I have never been able to fully explain it. I «feel» that you «feel» like you have to «feel» the life, and this verb, which I use and which is not sufficent, wouldn’t represent, and can’t represent whatever an inner organ perceives, an organ not making part of the five senses. It is a language, created for the practical life, but which does not know yet how to express itself. So, I immerge not only in the language, but in the painting as well, and feel that it can be satiated and satiate with sensibility, as rarely happens.