Watch the curators discuss the exhibition
Perché più bruci is devoted to the Italian artist Leoncillo Leonardi (1915–68). The sculptor’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and the opening chapter of a trilogy dedicated to his work, it is curated by Lorenzo Fiorucci, Alberto Salvadori and Azalea Seratoni, and marks the beginning of Thaddaeus Ropac’s representation of the Fondazione Leoncillo.
Bringing together sculptures and works on paper spanning four decades, the exhibition places the body at its centre - the thread that runs, unbroken, through Leoncillo’s entire artistic and intellectual journey: from the early olive tree drawings to the chromatic volumes of his beginnings, to the faceted, Post-Cubist sculptures of the 1950s, and on to the Informale outcomes of his final decade.
Ulivo, 1933-34
Graphite on paper
49.5 × 33.5 cm (19.49 × 13.19 in)
From his first drawings of olive trees in the 1930s, the tree allowed Leoncillo to join nature to an idea of the body – the foundation of a poetics that would run through all the languages he later explored. Yet it is not a matter of imitating what nature produces, but of acting as nature acts: ‘a new natural object that comes into being through stratifications, furrows and tears that are those of our own being, that issues forth like our breath.’ This is the outcome Leoncillo reached in his final years.
Suonatori, 1938-39
Polychrome glazed terracotta
Violin player: 118 × 48 × 31 cm (46.46 × 18.90 × 12.20 in)
Horn player: 119 × 45 × 32 cm (46.85 × 17.72 × 12.60 in)
Myth becomes a means of dissent from the monumental vision of an increasingly propagandistic regime. Leoncillo, a dissident, responds with an anti-monumental expressionism that recovers the formal freedom of Baroque Rome and fuses it with the decadence of the Roman School, dissolving matter into colour – the device that earned him art historian Roberto Longhi’s illustrious baptism as a ‘patetico barocchetto spoletino’: a ‘pathetic little Spoletan Baroque’.
In 1939, in Umbertide, Leoncillo began a collaboration with the Rometti manufactory that would prove fundamental: here, he deepened the technical aspects of ceramic work, acquiring a particular mastery of glazes and colour, and it was in these kilns that the most important works of his early production took shape. I Suonatori (1938–39) represent the first true generative act of Leoncillo’s research: they are the first work in which the sculptor combines his ability to model clay with the skill of fusing matter and colour – the defining trait of all his research to come.
Trofeo, 1940-41
Polychrome lustred terracotta
109 × 49 cm (42.91 ×19.29 in)
Trofeo (1940-41) is part of of the Trofei series – assemblages of heroic, warlike motifs – conceived to decorate the E42, the original code name for Rome’s EUR district, after the Esposizione Universale 1942, a Fascist-era world fair that was never held due to the Second World War and the fall of the regime. In the series the plants themselves become bodies as the glaze exalts the gleaming, coloured matter: dressed like victorious soldiers, then undressed to reveal their natural essence, they merge nature and the human figure and announce a season of direct, naturalist observation.
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
Taglio rosso, 1964
Terracotta and glazes
82 × 50 × 20 cm (32.28 × 19.69 × 7.87 in)
Taglio rosso (1964) belongs to Leoncillo’s series of Tagli (Cuts) in which the wound becomes the very subject of sculpture. A vertical mass of striated terracotta, worked in slips and glazes, is split by a raw red fissure that lays the material open like living tissue. For Leoncillo, the cut was an act of radical identification with his medium, and the fracture reads, too, as the metaphorical scar of a regenerating post-war society, a renewal that could only be born from rupture.
The Tagli invite comparison with the sewn-up burlap wounds of Alberto Burri and with Lucio Fontana’s Tagli, the lacerations Fontana performed on canvas. Yet where Fontana sought to dematerialise the painted gesture, Leoncillo dove ever deeper into plastic materiality to divine its intrinsic expressivity. In Taglio rosso, form finally dissolves into matter and wounded matter becomes living flesh: sculpture becomes a place of introspection and intense emotional tension, where the body is, at last, a site of experience, pain and life.
Taglio nero, 1964
Terracotta and glazes
84 × 50 × 26 cm (33.07 × 19.69 × 10.24 in)
Among the most powerful of Leoncillo’s late works, Taglio nero (1964) belongs to the series of Tagli in which the wound becomes the very subject of sculpture. In Taglio nero that solidification takes the form of a dark mass that seems to have poured and set like a flow of lava, cooling into jagged, blackened slabs; and yet it is always colour that permeates the earth, making of it mass, volume, body.
Mutilazione, 1963
Terracotta and glazes
61 × 11 × 11 cm (24.02 × 4.33 × 4.33 in)
Made in 1963, Mutilazione belongs to the final, existential season of Leoncillo’s work, when the body survives only as wounded matter. Tall and narrow, this columnar form in terracotta and glazes rises like the fragment of a torn, lacerated body, its pale surface furrowed and scarred with passages of black; the very title names the violence inscribed in the material, in which growth and decay — life and its undoing — are held together.
As in the Tagli of these years, the wound is not a subject depicted but an event enacted in the clay itself. Leoncillo, who conceived his material as living flesh, makes of the fired earth a site of pain and endurance, where matter is at once mutilated and, in the same gesture, rendered expressive and alive.
Taglio bianco, 1961
Stoneware and glazes
57 × 22 × 12 cm (22.44 × 8.66 × 4.72 in)
A slender vertical mass of striated, stoneware and glazes, Taglio bianco (1961) is characterised by incisions flaring with points of red at the core. For Leoncillo, the cut was an act of radical identification with his medium – to sever the clay with a wire was, in his words, ‘a decisive gesture, cruel and liberating’ – and the fracture reads, too, as the metaphorical scar of a regenerating post-war society
Tempo ferito, 1963
Grease pencil on paper
69 × 45 cm (27.17 × 17.72 in)
Taglio bianco, 1967
Tempera and PVA glue on cardboard
35 × 24 cm (13.78 × 9.45 in)
In the post-war years, Leoncillo firmly espoused the idea of a socially engaged art and joined the Fronte Nuovo delle Arti, the grouping of artists established by Giuseppe Marchiori in 1947.
A partisan in the Resistance and the Liberation, he made the body a witness to the tragedy of history and war.
Centralinista, 1949-51
Glazed ceramic
113 × 62 × 30 cm (44.49 × 24.41 × 11.81 in)
Modelled between 1949 and 1951, the work belongs to the socially engaged season that followed the Second World War, in which Leoncillo made the body a place of memory and modern labour.
The figure of a woman seated at a telephone switchboard is filtered through a markedly Post-Cubist sensibility: the body is broken into faceted planes, and brilliant colour no longer describes the figure but carves it into distinct, shifting surfaces. From Cubism, Leoncillo takes the strong opposition of planes, the blocks of clay, the decomposition and interpenetration of the parts of the image; but colour plays a decisive role, becoming matter itself.
The work marks a decisive step in his gradual departure from figuration: in Centralinista the everyday and its labour still enter his art as subject, while in the years that followed subject itself would dissolve into gesture and pure matter.
Controluce, 1957
Stoneware and glazed enamels
65 × 35 × 7 cm (25.59 × 13.78 × 2.76 in)
Made in 1957 — the year of the profound crisis that led Leoncillo to resign from the Communist Party — the works belongs to the threshold of his final, Informale decade. Across a shallow slab of stoneware and glazed enamels, low relief and colour set up a play of light and shadow in which the naturalist motifs of these years begin to dissolve towards abstraction.
In these late works Longhi spoke of a ‘solidification of light’, a motif of distant Baroque ancestry that he applied to these Informale-inflected sculptures. That solidification lies precisely in the relationship between different material qualities — the natural opacity of the fired earth and the lustre of the glazes — and in the two-toned colouring that characterised Leoncillo’s works of these years.
Senza titolo, 1957
Tempera on paper
32.5 × 22 cm (12.80 × 8.66 in)
Senza titolo, 1957
Tempera on paper
32.5 × 22 cm (12.80 × 8.66 in)
Senza titolo (San Sebastiano), 1963
Terracotta and glazes
59 × 17 × 13 cm (23.23 × 6.69 × 5.12 in)
Made in 1963, Senza titolo (San Sebastiano) retains the formal characteristics of Leoncillo’s late work. San Sebastiano stands as an emblem of tempo ferito — ‘wounded time’ — one that never sacrifices an impulse of sensual vitality to the crudeness of reality.
Donna al sole, 1965
Engobed terracotta
37 × 81 × 22 cm (14.57 × 31.89 × 8.66 in)
The work belongs to the final years of Leoncillo’s life. Here the artist navigates towards abstraction, yet the work remains a sublimation of forms that never quite deny the initial presence of a human body.
The surface plays on a dual chromatic register: the warm, earthy red of the natural terracotta against the paler, matte veil of the engobe — a slip of liquid clay brushed over the body before firing — so that colour seems to arise from the material itself. Donna al sole (1965) spreads low and wide, recalling the flow of lava: as lava pours downward and expands uncontainably, occupying space in jagged clods, so the body here settles and disperses across the ground.
Donne al sole (studio), 1965
Ink on paper
12.5 × 19.5 cm (4.92 × 7.68 in)
Amanti antichi, 1965
Semi-refractory terracotta and glazed enamels
76.5 × 173.7 × 42.21 cm (30.12 × 68.39 × 16.62 in)
Amanti antichi (1965) is among the major works of Leoncillo’s final years. More than a metre and a half wide, this horizontal composition in semi-refractory terracotta and glazed enamels lays two intertwined figures into a single expanse of worked matter. Modelled, fired and glazed with total command of the medium, its surface fractures, folds and settles like geological strata, so that the lovers are less depicted than sedimented into the material itself. By this date, Leoncillo’s subjects had all but dissolved into matter: what remains of the human figure survives as pressure, incision and colour within the clay. The work exemplifies the technical mastery of Leoncillo’s late abstraction.
Amanti antichi (studio), 1964-65
Terracotta
17.7 × 28.7 × 6.3 cm (6.97 × 11.30 × 2.48 in)
This small terracotta is the preparatory study for Amanti antichi (1965), among the major works of Leoncillo’s final years.
Modest in scale yet dense with information, the study allows us to witness the genesis of the work — from the first idea to the working of the material. Here, Leoncillo tests the disposition of the two bodies and the behaviour of the clay, thinking through in miniature the fractures, folds and pressures that the finished sculpture would carry at full scale.
Amanti antichi, 1966
Tempera and PVA glue on paper
24.4 × 33 cm (9.61 × 13 in)
What matters to me in the work is only what is seen, what is written with matter on the page of our perception; what can be read simply by looking at the sculpture: opposed, therefore, to a conceptual space. Conceptual, too, is the space of ancient statuary, which has behind its surface muscles and bones of marble, as well as that of much abstract sculpture, which is built on mental anatomies.
— Leoncillo
The exhibition marks the first public presentation of Colomba (1952–54), a work rediscovered through the study and research of the scientific committee of the Fondazione Leoncillo and restored to the configuration that its original display was conceived for.
Colomba, 1952-54
Polychrome lustred terracotta
75 × 90 × 65 cm (29.53 × 35.43 × 25.59 in)
A unique work in polychrome lustred terracotta, conceived to be suspended from the ceiling, it takes as its subject the dove — the universal emblem of peace — sounding a note of hope in the fraught years of post-war reconstruction.
Only recently rediscovered, the work is among the most significant of the artist’s production of the early 1950s. Its form remains legibly figurative, yet the wings and body are already broken into planes and charged with colour and light, anticipating the faceted, Post-Cubist idiom that would surface in works in the years immediately following.
The planes become round again and bound to one another, no longer squared and set side by side in continual opposition. And this because the image had first formed within me […] and then translated itself into another object with a colour of its own, a plasticity of its own. This sculpture opened a new field for me, in which I am now moving. I feel freer now for a sculpture of pathetic narration...
— Leoncillo
Incontro d'inverno, 1963
Tempera on paper
68 × 48 cm (26.77 × 18.90 in)
Leoncillo Leonardi (1915–68) was born in Spoleto, Italy. He began working with clay in 1930, attending the Institute of Art in Perugia. In 1935 he moved to Rome where he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts. In 1939 he settled in Umbertide, commencing his collaboration with the Rometti manufactory, a pivotal moment in the development of ceramic technique. In 1940, at the bequest of architect Giò Ponti, he exhibited his work for the first time at the VII Milan Triennale.
During the Second World War, he was actively involved in the Resistance, and after the Liberation in 1944 he participated in Art against Barbarism. Roman artists against Nazi-Fascist oppression, at the Galleria di Roma. He joined the Fronte Nuovo delle Arti in 1947, with whom he exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1948. He would go on to participate in five more editions of the Venice Biennale in 1950, 1952, 1954, 1960 and 1968. His work was included in a group exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (1948) and his first solo exhibition took place at the Galleria del Fiore, Florence (1949). In 1950, his sculptures were included in the major exhibition Italy at Work: Her Renaissance in Design Today, which debuted at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, before touring to 11 other venues in the USA. In this decade, he exhibited at the Antwerp Biennale (1953, 1959) and Rome Quadriennale (1955, 1959), and staged his second solo exhibition at Galleria La Tartaruga, Rome (1957), following his resignation from the Communist Party. In 1954, he won the Faenza Prize, a prestigious competition for contemporary ceramic art.
In 1962, his work was included in Sculptures in the City – V Festival of Two Worlds, Spoleto, curated by Giovani Carandente. He was awarded the Faenza Prize for the second time in 1964. His work was the subject of solo exhibitions at venues including Galleria Blu, Milan (1960); Galleria L’Attico, Rome (1962); Galleria Odyssia, Rome (1965; travelled to Galleria Odyssia, New York); and Modern Art Agency, Naples (1968): and group exhibitions at international institutions including the Musée Rodin, Paris (1960, 1966); Louisiana Museum, Humlebaek (1961); Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh (1964); and Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (1964).
Since his death, Leoncillo’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions including the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome (1979); Rocca Albornoziana, Spoleto (1985); Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Palazzo Forti, Verona (1985); Museo Internazionale delle Ceramiche, Faenza (1995); Fonti del Clitunno, Campello sul Clitunno (2015); and Museo Novecento, Florence (2021). He was also included in group shows at institutions including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1986); Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (1990); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1994); Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence (2012); Museo Internazionale delle Ceramiche, Faenza (2014); Palazzo Fortuny, Venice (2017); Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome (2018); and Palazzo Strozzi, Florence (2018).
