LEONCILLO LEONARDI

Among the most significant sculptors of the twentieth century, Leoncillo Leonardi—known as Leoncillo—worked with clay from childhood to his earliest days as an artist. During his career, he first created figurative ceramic sculptures, reflecting Baroque and Cubist influences, before turning in the late 1950s towards abstraction. The works he made from this point, until his untimely death at the age of fifty-two in 1968, portray the material essence of clay. For Leoncillo, it represented the ultimate embodied medium; “Clay is like my own flesh, an absolute process of identification (whose expressive prerequisites I know like the fingers of my hand, just as the choice of cracked surface alongside glossy surface is one of the coexistences that fill my days).”

His practice of sculpting with clay was essentialand symbiotic; he positioned the medium asone that he suffused with life, and also derivedlife from. He wrote, “Clay of my clay, manmadematerial of mine, and yet metaphorically imbuedwith all that I have seen and loved, everything Ihave grown close to, clay metaphorically imbuedwith all that is within me...” He continued, “Claybecomes ‘our own’ material by virtue of the acts weperform both on and with it, acts that spring froma reaction intrinsic to our being, acts born of fury,tenderness, despair, prompted by the fact that weare alive, by all that we feel and see.”

Among the twelve historically significantsculptures featured in the exhibition will be SanSebastiano nero (1962) and Tempo ferito II (1963),both last exhibited in New York in Leoncillo’s celebrated solo exhibition at Galleria Odyssia in 1965. SanSebastiano nero forms part of the San Sebastiano cycle the artist began in 1960, featuring abstract columnarsculptures of glazed and engobed terracotta. The work makes reference to Saint Sebastian, an earlyChristian martyr who was tied to a tree and shot with arrows as a punishment for his beliefs. Leoncillohad previously portrayed the subject in 1939, creating a figurative version of the saint in the round.

Tempo ferito, translating to “wounded time,” is one of two sculptures of this title Leoncillo created in 1963.The present work was included in the 1972 Venice Biennale. The artist remarked on the sculpture andthe concept of wounded time, “The days are all unchanging, one after another.... The days accumulate,create a time, a packed cadence of both different and same. In their midst, a great fissure enters and getslost among them. Like some ancient ruin, bricks tumble one beside the other, unexpectedly devouredby a scourge that renders them all undifferentiated.” Leoncillo and the Soul of Clay reveals a singular unitybetween artist and medium, with clay becoming the vessel for Leoncillo to expose the material’s truth aswell as his own. “I am just someone living his life,” he said, “because at this point this work I do comes asnaturally to me as breathing and living.”

Of the exhibition and collaboration, Dominique Lévy shares, “As a gallery, we have a commitment toItalian art and we are thrilled to work hand in hand with experts on the artist in Enrico Mascelloni and Galleria dello Scudo.” The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue featuring a new essay byMascelloni and the first complete English translation of the artist’s important Piccolo diario (Little Diary),published as an expanded and illustrated reproduction by Galleria dello Scudo and Skira in 2018.

Leoncillo and the Soul of Clay will be on view concurrently with Bacon / de Kooning, the first exhibition toplace the figuration and abstraction of Francis Bacon and Willem de Kooning in dialogue. Leoncillo toobridged figuration and abstraction in his work, commenting the relationship between the two whenhe reflected, “To me the great shock was Abstraction versus Figuration. That paralyzed me for yearsand years. I know that I can achieve, that an artist can achieve, through nonfigurative form, a powerfulexpressive intensity much like what can be attained through figurative art.”

Courtesy Lévy Gorvy Dayan