«Few things, protected by solid walls, or scattered across the vast Valais landscape, accompany Rilke, like distant and tenacious habits. They live in the vastness of a metaphorical and real landscape interwoven with a thousand voices which, together, participate in a single, powerful melody». The words Sabrina Mori Carmignani uses to introduce the writer’s reflections, poet and playwright Rainer Maria Rilke around the melody of things, and therefore the emotions, meanings and sensations he attributes to them, allow us to identify the relationship that Leonardo Devito weaves with his favourite things, as the title of the exhibition declares. It is, as for Rilke, an intimate relationship with things, a term that identifies not only objects but also certain situations and atmospheres tuned together in a melody.
«Few things, protected by solid walls, or scattered across the vast Valais landscape, accompany Rilke, like distant and tenacious habits. They live in the vastness of a metaphorical and real landscape interwoven with a thousand voices which, together, participate in a single, powerful melody». The words Sabrina Mori Carmignani uses to introduce the writer’s reflections, poet and playwright Rainer Maria Rilke around the melody of things, and therefore the emotions, meanings and sensations he attributes to them, allow us to identify the relationship that Leonardo Devito weaves with his favourite things, as the title of the exhibition declares. It is, as for Rilke, an intimate relationship with things, a term that identifies not only objects but also certain situations and atmospheres tuned together in a melody.
Starting from an imaginary or a subject, such as the well-known Turin market, Devito prefers to give life to a spontaneous narration, leaving room for his own imagination guided by painting which progressively expands the mental image, transforms it and exhausts it. The artistic process is thus more sincere and spontaneous for the artist whose openly playful action is performed on small and medium-sized canvases and bas-reliefs, necessary to be able to grasp his favourite things in their entirety and simplicity. The disinterested and playful character actually seems to become an expedient of defence: offering one’s things of affection can be tiring since it implies extrapolating them from oneself and letting them be looked at from the outside, understanding them without succumbing to them. Thus, the transformation of their pictorial and sculptural restitution into a moment of play allows the artist to take distance from it, which protects him from possible emotional loss. The game, not surprisingly, also becomes the subject of different works: an example is “Gormiti” which, recovering the Byzantine aesthetic in the spatial rendering, shows inert adolescence in front of a childhood that has just ended, for which he feels nostalgia and at the same time the urgency of detachment.
Devito’s ultimate intent is not to create finished narratives, on the contrary, it is to allow the observer to complete the reading of the work through one’s own position of vision which, articulated and complex, awakens distant memories and sensations.
The artist therefore urges us not to let go of the things with which we establish a profound connection: emblematic, in this sense, is the work “Signori Calabresi”, created starting from the drawing by a couple, found by chance, which allowed Devito to bring out a mental place of affection linked to his grandparents, to his distant Calabrian origins, to the colours, to the atmosphere that one breathes there. His artistic sensibility therefore arises from the urgency to return the harvest of his favourite things carefully protected, first delicately cultivated.
Laura Di Teodoro
Erik Saglia takes on these considerations for his second solo show to propose an installation, made with his renowned technique. As the result, the entire installation is a Cosmogony of signs and intersecting lines, of vectorial axes, of organized schemes of an unorganized reality, where the intersection of the abscissa and the ordinate organizes the vision of both the Artist and the Man. The visitor is compelled to contemplate it exactly as it happens while observing the cosmos through a telescope. Saglia’s Art is a full-size Portable Cosmogony because it can be carried “within us”.