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Paradossi del volo a cura di Giorgio Celli

Circolo degli artisti di Faenza
29 ottobre-14 novembre 2004

Lessing’s notion, expressed in his essay on Laocoonte, was that – unlike poetry, which requires a certain reading time – painting allows for a simultaneous, overall perception. Obviously, he was wrong. As the Russian psychologist Jarbus demonstrated during the recently concluded century, the viewer’s eye travels along a genuine perceptive path across the painting, passing over the same details time and time again, making it fully appropriate to speak of reading also in this case and hence of a reading time. Recently Castel, in a series of his brilliant conferences, considered the work of art, the painting, from a physiognomical point of view, examining the gestures and facial expressions of the figures represented as narrative elements of a story which runs alongside the more strictly aesthetic perception of the work. We are thus dealing here with a reformulation the interrelationship between the renowned perception/interpretation couple made up of iconography on one hand (which is simply that which can be seen in the picture) and iconology on the other (which complements that which can be seen with that which is known). This coupling often leads not only to a broadening of empathy, but also to our assessment of the work being turned on its head. Thus, it seems clear to me that iconology always tends to suggest a story: while the abstract painting tells its own story, the non-abstract narrates a story, one which has a before and after – if you will excuse the over-simplistic terminology.
With his paranoid swarm, whose portentous flight unfolds over some 30 metres of paper, Luca Leonelli has clearly opted for one approach: to peremptorily offer up a form of painting which takes on the peripatetic nature of a fully-fledged epic. As I looked at this rather special work, the analogy with an entomological Via Crucis sprung to mind. The strip brings together the feel of some story-teller who might have been found once upon a time in a market square; a scientific illustration from the zoology textbook of an imaginary planet; lastly, and most importantly, the description of a journey through forms, the convulsionary diagrams of an extraordinary metamorphosis. Because this swarm of fantastical animals – be they ghosts of ants or bees flying over meadows and marshes, turning into a crowd within the crowd – is presented as a natural event translated into painting, it therefore aspires to break through the canonical boundaries of painting as it runs along its dithyrambic course. Which finishes, I might say, falling like Alice into a black hole which comes out on the other side of the looking-glass – behind the painting itself, in other words!
Yet this also makes it clear once and for all that the paranoia of flight is, in actual fact, a critical paranoia and – as such – conceals a sardonic conceptual operation. This is a painting which charges along the walls like a raging river of colour: overstepping and overflowing, hinting at a possibly infinite progression. A work which is not only but perhaps more than anything else…a gesture!
Giorgio Celli Ottobre 2004

WITH THE SWARM IN HIS EYES
The great surprise which Luca Leonelli has in store for the visitors to this exhibition is that a technique such as water colour, almost always adopted to make small pools of colour on an immaculate sheet, might be used to narrate an uninterrupted voyage across over 30 metres of paper, like a flight with the swarm in one’s eyes.
Faced with this flood of chromatic sensations, the ‘reader’ is forced to get to grips with the paradoxical situations which take shape on the sheet right from the very first appearance of the swarm: its birth – both formless and figurative – up until its final exit through a hole in the wall. A point not chosen at random: a hypothetical opening which calls on our imagination to carry on beyond the wall itself, perhaps to start over again, in the pictorial flow of a great human assembly, in an endless repetition of flight.
Yet it could never be the same journey again. No repetition is possible, other adventures will take the swarm towards the unknown, engulfing the visible and the invisible together in a single movement which toys with the infinite prospective of the void.
Being used to conceiving art as a pictorial fable set on the crossover between natural symbols and allegories, Leonelli puts the fluidity of colour to the test as he broadens and narrows, expands and contracts, thickens and lightens to give a true sense of convulsion, constantly renewing the unspeakable thrill associated with flight.
In this swarm, which buzzes around itself and unfurls into the changing environment without a second thought, the artist outlines a vision of existence as an unforeseeable experience. We are faced with a restless state which resembles the mayhem of external reality, and yet one which will not accept any form of limitation nor provocation: only analogies with the most contrasting vicissitudes of nature.
Visible moods and feelings are treated with impulses of colour provided by multiple strokes of the brush: the impulses of air which becomes a vortex, the impulses of water which look more like liquefied matter, the impulses of fire which move like flickering tongues, without forgetting the secret impulses of the earth – seemingly overlooked by the path of the swarm, yet an underlying reference in each transformation of the flying image.
This swarm of chromatic impulses feeds on an urge to rush at great speed towards its goal: an urge which an artist with such a strong imagination like Leonelli is fascinated by. In other words, towards the furious spectacle of the ‘light-wave’, within the dynamism of the figures propagated as far as the eye can see, beyond the vortex of nature which draws one’s gaze into its own relentless flow.
If we follow the linear development of this visual and verbal scripture, we get the feeling that the painter might have started from any point at all, such is the way for the originary shapes to enter the scene: shapeless and mysterious, bare-faced yet secretive, thrust into the crucible of existence to face its intermittent, inescapable cycles of commotion.
Leonelli sees the swarm as a metaphor of social space, crowded out by beings who always seem to have an over-the-top way of relating to others, making it an overflowing, deformed space, shaken by rapid movements which leave no room for meditation, only the torrential rhythms and the mindless rush onward. It does not matter where; the only thing that counts is that nothing should be left in its wake, and that the path of the journey should lead towards the other side of the world.
On the other hand, was the artist able to foresee the direction the creative act would take, how long it would take, and how one image would turn into another? Might he really have been aware of everything that this ambitious project would entail, or even that the journey through reality would never stop but merely mutate in its pattern of occurrences and recurrences?
In the light of this impossibility to foresee the unforeseeable, the flight is undertaken with the use of paradox, insofar as its truth is always elsewhere with regard to the painted image, it is made up of figures fleeing into a wayward flow of colour, in the vibrant movement which engulfs the enormous roll of paper with its shower of symbols, handwriting and voluptuous Baroque curves. These partial glimpses each beat out the contagious rhythm of the swarm; their varying articulation of the overall tension of the flight spreads through the environment under a dominant hue of red. After representing the birth and development stages of the swarm, we find ourselves almost halfway through the tale, faced with the sidelong doubled image of a face: perhaps a self-portrait of the artist at the mercy of his own creative turmoil. Then comes a small skull poking out from a crowd of wandering bodies: the oscillation of human destiny on the verge of opposing prospectives – the individual and the group, life and death, violence and pain, and above all the desire to comply with the excesses of the mind and body.
Only in the second half of the journey, as if gratified by its own image, does the swarm spread out into a reverie of lush greenness crossed by spasms of grey and ripples and bounces full of light and shade which slide and shatter across the sheet, almost noisily. At the same time, man rediscovers his natural roots, the movement of the swarm takes on an almost cosmic attitude, and the shapes of the bodies are identified with the dynamism of visionary thought which carries on unhaltingly, at times over-dramatic and irritated by its own ferocity.
For Leonelli, imagining flight means continually finding new solutions to the same dynamic impulses; it means shaking the space available until it reveals new points of contact between man and nature; invisible yet ongoing. This is because the generative function of nature is such that it represents the indescribable condition in which he rediscovers his own origins deep in the labyrinths of matter, not in another world.
Even when he painstakingly depicts the sea and its inhabitants, the rapid movements of the frogs, the artist is clearly gripped by an expressive urge which turns the descriptive aspect into visions that lie beyond his fixed reference points: the eyes sink into the waves, the bodies take on the look of deformed animals, the hands are blurred by the speed of the lines, the heads look like an army marching into the waves. The ‘reader’ cannot but look on amazed in the face of these events which occur without reference points in the infinite 30-metre long space, 1.15 metres high.
Within this ever-fermenting swarm, something takes place which no other painting space can provide, insofar as it is prey only to the temptations of colour, to that instinct which pushes Leonelli to fight against the currents of air, the blasts of wind, the streams which connect one point to another until they are turned inside out and back to front only to lurch forward once more.
In these times of blind faith in immaterial forms of technology, the pleasure in seeing colour used not as yet another instrument which leaves man and his inventions behind is something which Leonelli’s enveloping work makes seem ever more important.
And it is a pleasure which is rooted in the complex working method of the painter, in his reflections both on the aggressive nature of man and even more so on the imaginative freedom of his incredible story, using a language which draws on various disciplines from art to anthropology. At the end of the day, this is the real cognitive and aesthetic value on which Leonelli bases his visionary notion of the social swarm: representing the heady adventure of flight as a general metaphor for existence through the endless flow of pictorial thought.
Claudio Cerritelli

Searching for Ulysses

‘The great Dinosaurs had long
since perished when their ships
entered the solar system, after
a voyage that had already lasted
thousands of years.’
S. Kubrick and A.C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey Screenplay

To follow the flight. Years of post-modern individualism and digital technology, in which the possibility to generate and distribute countless images continually distracts us from questioning the sense and purpose of each one, trained us to mistrust such a shamelessly Renaissance notion. How arrogant a proposal, how presumptuous an attempt is to sketch a universal vision of humanity, when the context is our all-encompassing Present of a thousand identical faces!

Yet, the vicissitudes of the swarm immediately grab our attention. They disturb and attract, by virtue of violent revolts that come to nothing as much as through the irony of the delicate peace among the frogs - without mentioning the final escape into the ‘Hole of Judgement’. What fascinates is the sense of a story, Our History as well as a point of view, a challenge to human reason and to the need to be critical despite the absence of illusions.

In fact, nothing is systematic in the flight if not a hint of doubt, which, unlike the Cartesian cogito, leaves nothing out, embracing all forms of matter and enveloping every element of its continuous evolution. Is there any sense to the individual existence in history? Is there a protagonist, a (preferably sentient) thread guiding and structuring the spasmodic and inexorable activity called life?

The question can only be posed, frequently, forcefully, in a number of forms. It is a baffling, dramatic homage to human rationality, whose wings cannot melt for there is no Icarus beating them in a death-defying challenge, but rather a tyrannical Throng bound by the laws of Nature and History, according to which neither the will nor the mere existence of the Individual may determine anything more than a flick of the painter’s brush.

The very act of generating flight, or even that of simply imagining it finished on the paper, entails firstly the need to abandon any attempt at imposing wholeness, coherence or unity of perspective. The only thing certain is that of the paradox itself: there may be no global reflection or general perception if not via the relinquishment of a view of the whole. What is the whole, Luca seems to ask, if not an experience of movement? The endless transformations of the swarm cannot but be seen in movement, be it that of the insects and frogs, be it that of the painter poised above the paper, or the visitor who moves along, steps back, turns around and walks back towards the images in the so vain yet so human hope of capturing a single essence of the swarm.

In flight, the paradoxes multiply and interplay to form a endless stream of unsatisfactory answers. Tracing out a sign means both taking and refusing a stance: a dynamic, unstoppable reflection, ever-present in the conscious intent of the work. The swarm throbs with the ineffable tension between comprehension and action: the former an inevitably simplifying, limiting, local force by virtue of its being individual; the latter a relentless process of continuous, extenuating, illogical transformation. Homo sapiens lives in the time and space of the very nature which defines the boundaries of her animal existence. The human is thus unavoidably defined by the horde. However, there is no love, nor any significant social relation, least of all a purpose to be witnessed in the flight: just the ceaseless drone of tumultuous passions, an incessant journey which is a guarantee of survival as vital as it is mysterious.

The question is multifaceted, both prescriptive and descriptive at once. It withholds the seeds of many answers but offers no solution, no decision – as can be the privilege of thought in images. Any written answer will inevitably reduce the complex range of perspectives present in the work. Nevertheless, Luca still makes use of words. He is fascinated by language to the point that he inserts it as a separate element with its own voice along the path beaten by the images. The artist is all too aware of the impossibility to separate the worlds of the body, verbal analysis and that of the finished image. We can almost make out the movements of the single, living, thinking and doubting body at work. Everything in the image is action: the tiniest stroke of the brush, watercolour appearing both harsh and slight on the sheet. Everything in action is thought: a commentary as fragmented as the experience which produces it, and therefore rightly expressed through a blend of impulsive exclamations, long-pondered reflections and natural yet knee-jerk reactions to the march of history.

It almost goes without saying that the most evident and important paradox of flight is that my father believes in Man. More than a matter of faith, his is a desire, a wish without great expectations but with a deep-seated and overwhelming sense of justice. There is no hope to be found in the throng of insects all intent on their aimless swirling. Despite this, the action carries on, along with the oft-frenetic series of events which are at times cyclical, rarely stable, but always provocative. Human livelihood ploughs on through the flow, through the continuous transformation which leaves nothing in a fixed, permanent state, not even in the moment of Judgement – this too is merely a passage. Thus, in this evolutionary process (where ‘evolutionary’ indicates the continuous self-constitution of the biological, rather than a rational aspiration to a progression), the human animal writhes along his search for individual freedom as longed for as it is seemingly unobtainable.
Sabina Leonelli, September 2004

I wanted the continuity of the image to be developed like the articulation of a discourse, a story without beginning or end, a language open to many different levels of communication. The beings shown here stand for elements that make up a whole which, in turn, defines the space of its own existence, creates situations, provokes reactions, changes meanings according to the specific environment, the cadence and rhythm of the movement, the timing.
In a collective, openly communicative environment, one may bend the rules which govern the movement of the brush in that particular moment – not, however, via objective scientific observation, even if it is able to plot a possible path through time and space. These social animals find a sense of purpose in the swarm and the relationships which form within it.
At the same time, this whole, with the rules and needs which dictate it, offers itself as a uniquely autonomous and independent body: an abstract body, greater than the sum of its component parts. Since it is made up of individuals, it appears incomplete, unpredictable, fortunately dialectic, decidedly unstable, laying down the tortuous rhythm of its own existence across the sheet.
Due to its very incompleteness, the swarm also has to endure that which is outside it and react to externally-imposed situations, open new courses, communicate with other compound and incomplete entities, and come up with new reasons for existing. Its rapid movement and the varying exposure to light bring about changes in the colour and size of the swarm.
Second thoughts owing to the hierarchical reorganisation caused by changes in direction mark out (as often happens at times of uncertainty) the stunning evolution of the swarm, in which formal and volumetric perfection is inversely proportional to the self-destruction of the components within. Yet no value judgement is given on their behaviour.
During the attack and invasion stages, the flight takes on a great sense of determination. The rectilinear flow gives an idea of speed and force which shatters against all obstacles in its path, destroying to some extent the cohesion of the various elements.
Likewise, in the phase when the curiosity to explore prevails, or the desire to occupy a space, the swarm seems to lose strength, yet this is merely a superficial impression. One realises that the occupation of space is highly systematic and great care is taken to maintain the cohesion of the troops. If anything, the swarm is far more numerous than expected, and does not conceive of boundary restrictions.
In order to get out of this game, the swarm’s attraction towards a small hole in the wall is exploited.
Luca Leonelli