TALLULAH STUDIO ART
Presents
Image as Threshold: Construction, Memory, and Materiality
Curated by Patrizia Madau
Phillip Toledano, Keila Guilarte, Donatella Izzo
May 22–24, 2026
OGR – Officine Grandi Riparazioni
Hall Fucine
Entrance Corso Castelfidardo, 22 – Torino
Preview
May 21 6:00 pm 9:00 pm
The Phair: Image as Threshold: Construction, Memory, and Materiality
For the 2026 edition of The Phair, Tallulah Studio Art presents a curatorial project that questions the very nature of the photographic image—today positioned at the crossroads of historical memory, technological innovation, and physical matter. Through the works of Phillip Toledano, Donatella Izzo, and Keila Guilarte, the exhibition traces a path from the creation of fictional archives to the rediscovery of archetypes and the deconstruction of the traditional portrait.
PHILLIP TOLEDANO: NEVER SEEN THE LIGHT
Tallulah Studio Art is delighted to present the Italian premiere of Never Seen the Light, the latest chapter in Phillip Toledano’s pioneering exploration of Artificial Intelligence. The project unfolds as a sophisticated exercise in “historical surrealism”: a series of black-and-white prints that masterfully mimic the aesthetic codes of 1940s documentary photography. Toledano stages a previously undiscovered archive attributed to Edward Trevor—a persona echoing the artist’s own father—claiming these shots were found among his late father’s belongings. However, this narrative is a deliberately deceptive device: every single image is the result of a synthetic generative process. Toledano doesn’t just produce images; he constructs an artificial memory with no referent in the real world. There are no negatives, no cameras, and no actual events. Through this tension between extreme visual credibility and a total lack of referential truth, Toledano examines the erosion of photography’s authority as a witness to the past, forcing us to confront the fragility of the trust we place in images.
KEILA GUILARTE: MI TIERRA
In a striking dialectic of contrasts, Keila Guilarte’s project, Mi Tierra, brings the focus back to the physical weight of the medium through the use of analog and digital black-and-white photography. While Toledano invents the past, Guilarte reactivates it as a living, breathing experience. Her work is a visual investigation of the act of “returning” as both a critical and emotional gesture: fragments of bodies, suspended movements, and urban glimpses of Cuba condense into a narrative that moves away from reportage to embrace the archetype. Using an essential photographic language, the artist works through subtraction, suspending time and removing the image from the contingency of the present. The four works selected for The Phair become devices of proximity. Here, photography does not act as a mere document, but as a space of reconciliation between belonging and distance, allowing the viewer to re-inhabit a land that is not just a geographic location, but a construction of identity.
DONATELLA IZZO: NO PORTRAIT
Ten years after its inception, No-portrait remains as conceptually urgent as ever, reaffirming Donatella Izzo’s practice as one of today’s most consistent and incisive inquiries into the relationship between image, body, and memory. The artist develops a radical reflection on the portrait and the construction of identity in contemporary visual culture, challenging any possibility of a stable or definitive representation of the face. The images, originally photographic, undergo a process of physical and material manipulation involving abrasions, scratches, cuts, and painterly interventions using layers of dust, pigments, inks, and plaster. The image sheds its descriptive function to become an unstable surface marked by cancellations and perceptual tensions. The face emerges as a fragile, unresolved presence, stripped of recognizability and distanced from the polished, standardized beauty of our time. Somewhere between photography, painting, and performance, No-portrait acts as an “anti-portrait” where identity is not asserted but continuously exposed to transformation and impermanence. In Izzo’s work, imperfection becomes an act of cultural resistance: the face no longer serves to identify the other, but to sense their elusiveness, offering a deeply human and open-ended image.
The artists
Phillip Toledano
Keila Guilarte
Donatella Izzo
Information:
INFO
The Phair – Photo Art Fair | OGR Torino
May 22-24 2026
12:00 noon to 8:00 pm
OGR – Officine Grandi Riparazioni
Hall Fucine
Entrance Corso Castelfidardo, 22 – Torino
Preview opening
May 21 2026 6:00 pm.
TALLULAH STUDIO ART
Patrizia Madau
Tel. +39 335 5929562
info@tallulahstudioart.com
www.tallulahstudioart.com
PRESS OFFICE
Studio Battage, Milano
Margherita Baleni
Tel. +39 347 4452374
margherita.baleni@battage.net