Renato Leotta: Unfolding of Time (Archaeology-Patisserie)

Archaeology-Patisserie

I imagined the landscape as the unfolding of time upon surfaces, including my own.
The outer layers contain an inner part. Fragrant surfaces – like wax or marzipan – or soft ones, like raw clay, compose a theatre of sweet images that belong to time: a barely sketched car (Gita), the cast of a beach shaped by the tide, imagined as the side of a female body (Nudo). A collection of universal images that speak of a slow and inexorably welcoming landscape; one rooted in the time of the Mediterranean.
Some mirrored shelves from an old patisserie, recently closed in the centre of Turin, act as ruins or a portal (capriccio). Along their upper edge, they host fragments of artifacts unearthed near ancient Greek and Archaic–Siceliota settlements.
A small slab of marble, painted with cyanotype – with the light of the sun – contains a sketched in pastel a map of the sky and the arrangement of the stars at a specific, potentially meaningful, moment. It suggests where we are – or where we’ve come from (natal chart).
On the ground, a loaf of bread – or perhaps a stone – glazed.

Renato Leotta

Mediterranean sentimental assortment

The surface as an archaeological excavation site, awaiting something to surface, a figure, a perceptible image, materializing. Less to instruct us on its nature, but rather to inform itself on what it endures over time. To capture the instant between its flagrant apparition and its obsolescence, to provide a support for its sweetness, its fragrance. 

The fascination with these amalgams, mixtures preceding images, demands the infantile gesture that does not speak, of a craftsman capable of reclaiming, provoking, dissolving or annihilating this landscape of transparencies exhumed and drawn from the opacity of their material evidence. The infantile gesture that seeks to touch things through drawing, to un-margin them from their contour – periechon: that which includes without including – to separate them from their name. 

It is necessary, therefore, before modeling these materials, to know how to induce in them a spontaneous alteration until one can mold with and through them the volume and the surface of their absence, deferred. 

Marco Nicodemo