TEFAF 2023. Art as infinite pleasure

To an art lover, getting lost in TEFAF is like being locked in a chocolate shop if you have a sweet tooth. A triumph of sensations that overlap one after the other until they stun you, make you intoxicated with shapes and colours. Paintings, sculptures, furniture, and objects of great value follow one another in a triumphal march that exalts the genius of man in making the passage of time immortal. Millennia are revealed to the eye in the wonder of the work of an artist, celebrated or unknown, who has made an idea tangible.

The 36th edition is being held until 19 March 2023 and brings together 268 galleries, 13 present for the first time, plus another 10 in the expanded TEFAF Showcase section that has been promoting the youngest galleries on the international scene since 2008.

More than 30 stands of Italian antiquarians and gallerists with offices in Italy, London and Paris confirmed the excellent presence of our antiques market.

A divine painter like Ingres was fond of saying that ‘Masterpieces are not made to astound. They are made to persuade, to convince, to penetrate into us through the pores’.

For a few more days, it will be possible to lose oneself in front of thousands of works that through the choice of a collector will become an intellectual exercise, the emotion of discovery, the pleasure of vision, the enjoyment of possession, where the soul can confront art, beauty, the perfection of an object, of a colour, of a form in balance with time, which reality makes fleeting.

The vibration of a glance, of an idea that takes on substance, of a glimmer of the absolute that becomes beauty, are revealed with disarming simplicity in an aphorism by the Enlightenment philosopher David Hume, which contains the manifest and hidden reasons for living within and for aesthetic joy: ‘The beauty of things exists in the mind that contemplates them’.