Wang Haiyang, Alessandro Teoldi & Feng Chen

Capsule Venice is delighted to present to the public its summer programme featuring three distinct, independent projects activating the different exhibition areas of Capsule's Venetian space located at Dorsoduro 2525. Love Dart is a solo exhibition of the work of Wang Haiyang. Alessandro Teoldi's Dipinti and Beats by Feng Chen are the two other special projects. All exhibitions will run from July 6 until September 8 2024.

Occupying the upper floor of the main space, as well as the entire annexed gallery, Love Dart presents the most recent body of works by the Chinese artist Wang Haiyang (b. 1984 Shandong; lives and works in Beijing). The new works are paired with a selection of the artist's most iconic video works and earlier paintings, thus providing the most complete survey of Wang's work to date. Working in painting and in animation, Wang Haiyang's practice challenges the viewer with its novel and constantly-evolving visual and conceptual tensions, through which the familiar and the uncanny overlap, opening new territories of existential possibility and alterity.
The title of the exhibition pays homage to the sharp, calcareous or chitinous darts which some hermaphroditic land snails and slugs create and shoot at each other during their mating process. Despite their still unclear functions, love darts are scientifically recognised as a tool for increasing reproductive success, having possibly evolved as a result of conflict over the fate of donated sperm, or as a way to select the most fit sperm donor. In previous decades, love darts were thought to be used to persuade the prospective mate. Although these past explanations have proven to be erroneous, they still hold a certain fascination for Wang, along with the idea that the connection of darts to copulation is already inscribed in the expression "love dart", evoking the arrows of Cupid/Eros. In this exhibition, Wang unfolds conceptual nuances such lacunae in knowledge imply, highlighting the simultaneous presence of attraction and repulsion, desire and danger, love and hate, life and death, excitement and fear, the interplay of controlling and being controlled.
Explored across a new series of watercolors, acrylics on canvas, as well as earlier pieces lent from private collections for the occasion, and animations, Wang's poetics refer to the continuous metamorphic process that relate the individual to the primal forces of life, death, lust, desire, and sex. Deploying a sophisticated, multi-layered painterly language, often bearing autobiographical dimensions, Wang reveals what lies in the hidden recesses of the human mind, its impulses and submerged forces.

Alessandro Teoldi's special project Dipinti is hosted in Capsule's Project Room 1. Teoldi's (b. 1987 Milan; lives and works in Brooklyn) homages to the language of painting, no matter whether in his newest oil on canvas pieces or his gouaches on paper, are expansive and resonant. On this occasion, the artist – who studied photography, first in Milan and then in New York, and who, in recent years, has come to prominence for works with aircraft blankets – uses an unfamiliar medium to present daily domestic scenes, familiar faces, intimate atmospheres, and sober situations. While not a widely known aspect of his practice, oils have long been a longstanding interest for the artist. The depictions in these new works exist as a sort of personal diary that is extremely true to life. The miniature size of the works stresses the idea of intimacy, the unassuming nature of his subjects which span from flowers to sardines, from landscapes to still lifes, and tributes to influences including Giorgio Morandi – one of the artists Teoldi indirectly quotes regularly. Also among the images is a naked male back, a body in front of a window, men showering. The works are a small encyclopedia of the quotidian that Alessandro's warm palette translates into imagery.

The Chinese multi-media artist Feng Chen (b. 1986 Wuhan; lives and works in Hangzhou) takes over the greenhouse in the garden as Project Space 2 to re-create one of his iconic site-specific pieces: The Darker Side of Light, a light and sound installation paired with the video Untitled (2015). Through the transformation and control of the blinds, Feng Chen creates an experience focused on stimulating visual and aural senses through which the audible becomes visible. In this suspended and almost alien room, sound sculpts space creating a disorienting field of experience in which the material and immaterial interlace; common rules of perception vanish to summon a new sensorial reality. Once entered into the space, the viewer is invited to embrace a new spatial and temporal logic in order to become fully aware of its function as another possible element activating the space or being activated by it. Synchronised rhythm becomes central to the experience of the works: sound is imbued with a certain tangibility, as in the projected video images that pulsate rhythmically, as in a sort of heartbeat of the space itself. The sight of the garden house from afar - appearing as a mirage, an alien pulsing body with its almost hypnotic lights, their alternate movements - becomes another vivid aspect of the work.