Leoncillo Perché più bruci

Because with [clay] a new organicity is possible. The organicity of what grows and is alive [...] Because ceramics, precisely, can give more than any other material those visible, almost tactile conditions through which a state of mind is expressed. — Leoncillo

Thaddaeus Ropac Milan presents Leoncillo. Perché più bruci – the Italian sculptor’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and the first chapter of a trilogy dedicated to his work, developed in collaboration with the Leoncillo Foundation and curated by Lorenzo Fiorucci, Alberto Salvadori and Azalea Seratoni. 
Tracing Leoncillo’s sustained engagement with clay as a vital vehicle for the expressive ambitions of modern art, the exhibition brings together sculptures and works on paper which traverse the four decades of his career. 

The form of the tree offered Leoncillo the possibility to blend a deep-rooted investment in nature with a poetic conception of the body, establishing a foundation for his artistic vision. From his early drawings of olive trees in the 1930s across the diverse artistic languages he subsequently explored, this motif remained a constant point of departure in his practice. It finds expression in the pastoral, mythological forms of his early sculptures, laden with literary references, and, later, in the improvisational, highly gestural abstract sculptures of his final decade, where fissures, splits and grooves become sites of material transformation. Leoncillo was not striving for mimetic representation; rather, he understood clay as a living substance that bore the potential of both destruction and renewal, and sculpture, by extension, as a process of continual becoming.