Crepuscolo Mediterraneo
Opening on Friday, April 1st at La Fonderia gallery is the solo exhibition of Fulvio Leoncini, featuring his recent cycle of works entitled Padiglione infinito (Infinite Ward).
The artist presents a selection of works centered on the unease of existence, on man seen as an eternal “patient.” This vision is not merely pessimistic, but rather animated by a love for life and, not least, permeated with sensuality. Pain and hope. Fittingly, Nicola Nuti, who curated the exhibition, subtitled it Crepuscolo mediterraneo (Mediterranean Twilight), drawing on the words of the poet Dino Campana.
Throughout his intense career, Leoncini has increasingly investigated the human soul, and cycle after cycle, the figure has become a poetic metaphor—a work “al nero” (in black / alchemy’s nigredo) where the dream serves as the incubation for inner metamorphosis.
Born in Empoli in 1960, the artist has numerous exhibitions to his credit in public and private spaces both in Italy and abroad (including the 2017 group exhibition he was invited to attend in San José del Cabo, Patricia Mendoza Gallery, Baja California Sur).
The exhibition is presented by Nicola Nuti and will remain open until April 23rd, from Tuesday to Saturday, 10:00 AM–1:00 PM and 3:30 PM–7:30 PM.
“Today more than ever, we need certainties, illusions, lightness. We would like an art that tears out our fear-filled hearts and returns them to us cleansed and comforted. But art never truly reassures: behind every glimpse of apparent serenity, a harmless figure, a balloon, or a simple monochrome, lie unexpressed anxieties, gazes hanging over the abyss. With Fulvio Leoncini, we get straight to the point: away with all complacency, away with narrative, away with any prettiness. And we are left to contemplate the remains of a world as if it were a battered body—wounded and stitched up—that you do not know will ever manage to rise again.
Indeed, what man experiences is truly an ‘infinite ward,’ a place where madness is normalcy and vice versa. Leoncini has well understood how mirror-like art and madness are; the poet Dino Campana knew this well, and it is from his work that I took the title of this exhibition. For him, poetry and art represented the dream—a path that lifts man from the banality of daily life (the ‘trivial facts’), to direct him toward the ‘ways of heaven,’ far from necessity.
Therefore, one must not view Leoncini’s work as a sort of painful soliloquy, but rather as the construction of a cathedral where the male di vivere (the pain of living) is represented and exorcised. His painted, marked, and incised pages are no cahier de doléances: they possess a monumental solemnity. Through his personal ‘shadow line,’ the artist kindles signals of light that one might call life or hope.
In Leoncini’s work, every mark is necessary, never decorative, and his process is controlled and measured. Although despondency is just around the corner, his painted page is made to last, as demonstrated by his careful application of layers of transparent wax, as if to protect the image. In these painted panels, there is a sacredness of pain that may catch you off guard, disconcert you, and drive you back into the anxieties you wish to evade; yet the love flowing beneath ultimately welcomes you, and you realize you are standing before a talisman, a viaticum for your existential journey.
All of this is a gift of poetry, in times when everything is measured in ephemeral degrees of superficiality.”
Nicola Nuti
