Leoncillo. Perché più bruci a Milan exhibition spans 40 years of research

Bianca Castelbarco Albani

From 16 September to 14 November, Palazzo Belgioioso hosts Perché più bruci, Leoncillo's first solo exhibition organised by the gallery in collaboration with the Fondazione Leoncillo. Curated by Lorenzo Fiorucci, Alberto Salvadori and Azalea Seratoni, the exhibition traces four decades of research through sculptures and works on paper, placing the relationship between nature, gesture and the transformation of matter at its centre.

The exhibition spans some 40 years of activity, bringing together sculptures and works on paper that trace the evolution of a language capable of transforming ceramic into a fully contemporary medium. Rather than a chronological reconstruction, the project identifies certain constants in Leoncillo's research, highlighting the continuity of a way of thinking that moves progressively from figuration towards a strongly organic form of abstraction.

The exhibition's title, Perché più bruci, evokes this ongoing tension between destruction and regeneration. Fire, an element indispensable to ceramics, becomes a metaphor for the creative process itself, in which matter is subjected to an irreversible transformation. It is a poetics that finds, in the apparent fragility of terracotta, an extraordinary capacity for expressive resistance. In recent years Leoncillo's work has been the subject of growing critical and museum attention, consolidating his role among the protagonists of 20th-century Italian sculpture.

The Milan exhibition forms part of this process of reappraisal, proposing an interpretative key that focuses not so much on the artist's stylistic evolution as on the consistency of a body of research developed around the relationship between nature, gesture and matter.