Exhibition from 16 May to 28 June 2015 in Pavullo nel Frignano (MO, Italy)

Humanology

Notes from a visual anthropologist

Opening:
Pavullo Palazzo Ducale -- mappaSaturday 16 May at 18h
Luca Leonelli will be present

Address:
Civic galleries of contemporary art
Palazzo Ducale (Ducal Palace)
Via Giardini, 3
41026 Pavullo nel Frignano (MO)
Tel: +39-536-29022
Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Community of Pavullo website (Italian)

Opening hours:
Saturdays 10h–13h and 16h–19h
Sundays and bank holidays 16h–19h
Tuesdays and Thursdays 15h–18h
From Monday to Friday on request: 10h–13h

The artistic body of work of Luca Leonelli, built up in parallel to his work as an architect, can be read like the choice of a blessed anachronist, a singleton in the panorama of contemporary art which is forced into repetition not for purposes of research but due to market forces. Leonelli is a sardonic and conscious persecutor of practices, theories and techniques as essential to the history as to the auspicious future of the arts. Among those are three fundamental premises: Art shapes consciousness; the conscious shaped by art is a vertiginous maze; and each authentic work of art contains an ironic stimulus whether strong or slight.

Hominis - oil painting by Luca Leonelli (2012)

The Palazzo Ducale presents in its contemporary arts gallery an exhibition arising from a representative sample, albeit partial, made by the artist and the curator out of an enormous choice from drawings, watercolours, paintings, one-of books, maps, sketches, plates, engravings and etchings.

Thus the Dionysian joy of Leonelli's hand shows a visual anthropology particularly dedicated to the hunderdfold study of the body, and hence to fleshy enquiries of the body without an esthetic pudor, expressing itself in magnificent scrolls that redo the narrative job of papyrus and tapestries.

This research, extraordinary in its vastness and form, comes to the conclusion of the canvas intended as a perfect and enigmatic composition, where pure painting returns and reveals the choices and motives of the artist.

—Paolo Donini