I PROGETTI:
Federico De Leonardis
Wall III
2005
From the seventies to today, the artist has been working on the re-elaboration of an individual and
collective memory through the instrument of space, placing at the center of his study the tools of
manual work, objects of historical value recovered from construction sites, workshops or
abandoned factories: hammers, anvils, nails, slings, gloves, bags of cement, plumb lines, chains,
steel cushions used to cut marble in quarries.
The tools tell the story of the object, as the memory of an experience, and are configured as signs
used to shatter the space, at any level of intervention, both urban and non-urban.
This research is placed in a clear historical dimension: the refusal to operate within the logic of a
cultural system reduced exclusively to commodification, and therefore the identification of aesthetic
operations capable of decoding, provoking, giving the possibility to break pre-established schemes.
The Cushions (Walls III) are remains of what De Leonardis defines as the true modern cathedrals:
the marble quarries, where the greatest violence is exercised on nature and on the landscape of
nineteenth-century oleographic iconography; they are used to break the blocks of marble through
the injection of pressurised water, which generated their particular shape. Through them, frozen in a
surreal, at times metaphysical, stillness, De Leonardis studies space, exploring the concept of
verticality.
"Stacked or isolated, they are current evidence of the creative effort and of the work of reflection by
the artist, of his sourcing trips to the marble quarries of Carrara; at the same time, they are evidence
of the hard work of marble extraction, of the heat and of the dust. They are different stories, yet
united by the strain of the hands, the sensuality of touching, clinging, cutting". The objects,
scratched by time, speak of the artist's experienced history and work, bearers of a memory that is
both personal and collective.
Bibliography
Federico de Leonardis, Catalog of Exhibition Premio Macugnaga Arte e Cultura, Vanilla edizioni, Savona, 2017
PHOTOGALLERY
SCHEDA OPERA
| Artista | Federico De Leonardis |
| Titolo Opera | Wall III |
| Data | 2005 |
| Tecnica | |
| Tipologia | Sculpture |
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