Paolo Leonardo

Galleria Alessandro Bagnai, Siena
Through April 7

Driven by a strong interest in mass-media iconography, Paolo Leonardo takes advertising images and changes them radically by painting over them in a wide variety of ways. Following a sort of ritual process, involving a strong critical element in relation to the approach of contemporary advertising, this young artist from Turin tears down adverts from walls along the road and re-employs them as supports for his work. The rough and crumpled paper, stuck onto canvas, form a strong material base that the artist then covers in paint, transforming the image into a completely new interpretation that cannot be copied.

The Polittico on display in this recent Sienese exhibit contains four adverts. Working from the same original source, Leonardo has transformed them all in turn with his energetic brushstrokes. In the first panel the image has been completely wiped out while in the other three thick bands of red and black redefine the outline of the same human figure. These broad lines of paint eliminate the details and the profile becomes stylized, without arms and legs, tending towards abstraction. In a series of three diptychs, the evanescent figure of a woman emerges through layers of silver paint. The paint takes on the appearance of a crust, from whose cracks appear the merely hinted-at traces of a female face.

Concluding the exhibit are nine black-and-white photographic works of male and female faces from times past. Framed by blood-red brushstrokes, their features are faded and dirtied by blotches of liquid color that accentuate their dramatic force. Explaining Leonardo’s approach is a video-documentary in super 8 filmed by Simone Mussat Sartor, which brings the show to a close and captures the artist at work in various European capitals.




Daniela Ardizzone
Translation by Rosalind Furness