Enea Toldo presents in the Salon an intoxicating experience, composed of earth, jute, and fire. He occupies the underground space with an almost archaic intent: to draw from what the ground offers and place it, frontally, before our eyes. This body of work carries a sharp awareness of the ephemeral—as if each thought, each gesture, each creation, precisely because it lasts only an instant, contains within it the weight of the whole.
The artist invites us into a dry, dense, and sensorial undergrowth, where the omnipresent, shifting, almost shamanic smell acts as a fragile lantern guiding us through the meanders of his work. One moves through it as much with the body as with the gaze, in an experience that engages the senses and unsettles perception.
His practice draws on elemental materialities, present in each of his pieces. Enea Toldo sources his materials himself—from the beaches of Naples to the volcanic landscapes of Lanzarote—embedding real, almost telluric geographies into his works. He paints using natural pigments he has also gathered, giving rise to paintings whose colors emerge from the earth, only to symbolically return to it through his gesture.
His figures and abstractions are permeated by the energy of the materials that compose them, as if these preceded the image and determined its form. In this way, the artist returns the viewer to a form of primacy of expression, through paintings that, while not prehistoric, reactivate certain of its gestures and principles. Medicinal plants also play a role in this practice, used as oils or leaves, literally infusing the space and the works, extending their presence beyond the visible.
The three monumental paintings, both through their presence and their tangible weight, evoke a “Golden Age,” which the painter approaches with a certain irony. This moment, described by Hesiod as a descent of Eden onto Earth—where everything abounds and productive activity becomes unnecessary—appears here as a collapsed fiction. This garden of the Hesperides is now nothing more than a remnant, and Enea Toldo invites us to question what might still emerge from its ruins: what gestures, what forms, what beliefs can still be invented there.

Text by | Thomas Havet