Leonardo Devito at Acappella

Artist: Leonardo Devito

Exhibition title: My Favourite Things

Venue: Acappella, Naples, Italy

Date: April 28 – June 5, 2023

Photography: © Danilo Donzelli / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Acappella, Naples

Acappella is delighted to present ‘My Favourite Things’ first solo exhibition with the gallery by the Italian artist Leonardo Devito.

“Few things, protected by solid walls, or scattered across the vast Valais landscape, accompany Rilke, like distant and tenacious habits. (…) They live in the vastness of a metaphorical and real landscape interwoven with a thousand voices which, together, participate in a single, powerful melody”. ¹ The words Sabrina Mori Carmignani uses to introduce the writer’s reflections, poet and playwright Rainer Maria Rilke around the melody of things, therefore the emotions, meanings and sensations he attributes to them, allow us to identify the relationship that Leonardo Devito weaves with his favorite things, as the title of the exhibition declares. It is, as for Rilke, an intimate relationship with things, a term that identifies not only objects but also certain situations and atmospheres tuned together in a melody. Devito’s works intend to restore his deep and solitary bond with them, carefully observed and preserved over time. In fact, the painting and the bas-relief never convey casual atmospheres, on the contrary they show scenarios that have deep and distant roots, linked to his personal history or to imaginaries in which he feels a part, sometimes taken from literature or from ancient, medieval and renaissance.

An example of this is ‘Spaghetto a Porta Palazzo’, a painting placed in a place in the artist’s heart that becomes a semantic field of affections, memories, pure and sincere references. Starting from an imaginary or a subject, such as the well-known Turin market, Devito prefers to give life to a spontaneous narration, leaving room for his own imagination guided by painting which progressively expands the mental image, transforms it and exhausts it. The artistic process is thus more sincere and spontaneous for the artist whose openly playful action is performed on small and medium-sized canvases and bas-reliefs, necessary to be able to grasp his favorite things in their entirety and simplicity. The disinterested and playful character actually seems to become an expedient of defense: offering one’s things of affection can be tiring since it implies extrapolating them from oneself and letting them be looked at from the outside, understanding them without succumbing to them. Thus, the transformation of their pictorial and sculptural restitution into a moment of play allows the artist to take a distance from it, which protects him from possible emotional loss. The game, not surprisingly, also becomes the subject of different works: an example is ‘Gormiti’ which, recovering the Byzantine aesthetic in the spatial rendering, shows inert adolescence in front of a childhood that has just ended, for which he feels nostalgia and at the same time the urgency of detachment. Devito’s ultimate intent is not to create finished narratives, on the contrary to let the observer complete the reading of the work through his own position of vision which, articulated and complex, awakens distant memories and sensations. The artist therefore urges us not to let go – in its broadest sense – the things with which we establish a profound connection: emblematic, in this sense, is the work ‘Signori Calabresi’, created starting from the drawing by a couple, found by chance, which allowed Devito to bring out a mental place of affection linked to his grandparents, to the distant Calabrian origins, to the colours, to the atmosphere that one breathes there. His artistic sensibility therefore arises from the urgency to return the harvest of his favorite things carefully protected, first delicately cultivated.

-Laura Di Teodoro