La Fonderia Art Gallery presents Geografie emotive (Emotional Geographies), a solo exhibition by Leonardo Moretti, opening on Saturday, November 5th at 6:30 PM at the Florentine gallery’s venue in Via della Fonderia 42R.
Curated by Mattia Lapperier, the exhibition presents a comprehensive summary of Moretti’s recent research, which is conceptually—as well as chromatically—divisible into three distinct strands. Lace is the cycle dedicated to lace, understood by the artist as the embodiment of the superfluous, an exaltation of inauthenticity and artificiality in relationships; it is a tangle of modular signs, articulated in space to create infinite combinations with one another. While black connotes Lace, red is the color of Love project. This cycle stems from a bitter reflection on love, which led the artist to observe how it can sometimes be reduced to a futile attempt to satisfy a desire. It is a more intimate, more reflective body of work, and for these reasons, ideally close to the third series, which the artist entitles Il blu mi aiuta a ricordare (Blue helps me remember). Emotional and liminal, this final cycle consciously renounces any claim to organicity, consisting instead of single, autonomous life narratives.
While also holding their own individually, the works by Leonardo Moretti presented in the exhibition compose an articulate environmental installation aimed at reflecting the artist’s inner self. By following the connecting threads between the various works, the viewer is invited to explore the artist’s psyche, to come into contact with his inner world, and even to identify with it. Black, red, and blue serve as temporal and symbolic coordinates. For the artist, they represent the future, the present, and the past respectively, and together they allude to the entirety of his own psychic life. Taken individually, the three colors also refer to three recurring concepts that have accompanied Moretti’s artistic practice since his debut: namely death, passion, and memory.
Utilizing mostly reclaimed materials ranging from canvas to wood, paper to plexiglass, and polystyrene to yarn, and employing mixed media techniques refined over time and freely integrated with one another, Leonardo Moretti gives life to an authentic mapping of his own unconscious. The artist’s emotional geographies thus become accessible to the observer’s gaze without any mediation; they sketch clear and distinct echoes of otherwise inaccessible inner processes within the space.