Valentina Teglas is a conceptual contemporary artist who lives and works in Legnano, Italy. Her practice investigates the dynamics of social adaptation and the normalizing mechanisms that govern the construction of identity, focusing in particular on the experience of neurodivergence...
Read MoreValentina Teglas is a conceptual contemporary artist who lives and works in Legnano, Italy. Her practice investigates the dynamics of social adaptation and the normalizing mechanisms that govern the construction of identity, focusing in particular on the experience of neurodivergence and on the tensions between vulnerability, invisibility and resistance.
Working across linocut, photography, gouache and cyanotype, Teglas develops a visual language that interweaves the autobiographical and the political, questioning the behavioural models imposed by a neurotypical society. At the core of her research lies the concept of masking: the process through which autistic and ADHD individuals imitate dominant social codes in order to conform to standards alien to their own nature, which is a survival strategy that often entails a gradual erasure of the self and a rupture between inner life and social representation.
Teglas’s poetics is built around images of tension, where seemingly familiar elements take on a disturbing and ambiguous dimension. Her research offers a reflection on the body and on identity as territories crossed by social expectation, mechanisms of control and the desire for self-determination, giving form to a narrative that moves continually between wound and self-defence.
Alongside her artistic practice, Teglas pursues a path in conceptual editorial illustration, with a research focus on symbolic synthesis and the construction of narrative images.
