There is a strange dissonance between Tettamanti’s life as a traveller throughout the world where he roams freely without barriers and his expressive inclination that is so much about constraints and boundaries. In his relentless quest for pattern and order in the environment, Tettamanti wrestles landscape into the strict rectangular frame of his camera where it is clear that he is the master and nature is but a servant of his eye. Parallel lines are found and they recede obediently to the taught horizon; architectural verticles rise stiffly in line with the edge of the frame; shadows are banished and even nature’s light conforms to the command for uniform grey. And everywhere there are edges and borders to remind the viewer that order will prevail: in the middle of the wilderness, Tettamanti will find a man-made edge admonishing the organic forms of nature, Behave!  A telegraph pole, a wall or a path, however small physically, will assume dominant perceptual proportions; man-made structures and containers of various sorts sit within nature’s organic sprawl as symbols of control and come to define the landscape.

Tettamanti’s work is the very definition of form over content.  The hard edges of the frame and of the key elements define the form, and the huge, vigorous global environment is the content. His method dominates every frame, leavened by understated wit and a clear delight in the reclamation of order out of chaos. This is a very contemporary style applied with true panache: Tettamanti is committed and convincing in the consistency of his vision. Lurking under the severity of the structure there is a sensual pleasure in the purity of his vision. Random edges, planes and surfaces develop unexpected relationships, unplanned connections between the natural and the manufactured develop purpose in the rigour of the format, and minor absurdities assume significance in representation beyond their urban reality. And, washing over everything, there is a gentle enjoyment of colour, often muted in the ubiquitous grey light or highlighted by artificial sources, and only ever extreme in the unashamedly blown-out highlights, the only uncontrolled elements of his pictures. This is Tettamanti’s world: varied and expansive, yet uniform and contained.