When Léo Met Leo

Name: When Léo Met Leo
Start: 2022-06-25 00:00:00
End: 2022-07-05 00:00:00
Location: Palazzo Monti

Palazzo Monti

Brescia, Lombardy, Italy

Curated by: Costanza Nizzi

The show

This is not a Harry and Sally romance.

The first time Léo met Leo at the Palazzo it was fire and sparks. The artistic research of one seemed so distant to the other that it could not coexist under the same roof. The irreverent and provocative attitude of the works of Léo Luccioni (France, 1994) seemed to collide with the gracefulness and elegance of Leonardo Meoni's velvet canvases (Italy, 1994). The lively aesthetics and not too veiled symbology through which Luccioni creates fictitious narratives clashed with the poetics of Meoni's movement, where suspended images find peace in refined palettes.

The second time they met, they ignored each other. It was morning and they exchanged a glance on the stairs of the Palazzo in ma- lapena. Soon after they started working in their respective studios. Lucci, a multidisciplinary artist who had never done anything about painting, decided to create his first paintings. Where to start painting if not in a Palazzo in Italy? The reasoning does not make a fuss. This is how, wandering around Brescia, he was inspired by the most recurring symbol of the city: the lion, which in the painting takes the form of the icon of the Belgian supermarket Delhaize. But Luccioni could not leave an animal without its master, and here a portrait of a Flemish nobleman, whose features recall those of the little man of the Quacker Oats Company, began to take shape. No madness, no hallucinations, it is normal not to see the paintings described.

Initiated, not finished and left in the studio, they become ephemeral works in the narrative of the exhibition, as well as in the drawings N ° 2, Goodyear, Marianne Goodman Gallery, N ° 3, All Brand, Galerie Praz Delavallade, N ° 4, Petroll, Almine Rech Gallery, in which Luccioni tells of exhibitions with fictitious works in real institutions. Meoni, without wandering too much around the city, began traveling in his studio. Journeys into memory from which to recover images and memories that have remained etched after many changes on the velvet surface. Jaguars, fences and writings - protagonists of Pure Pepper, Piece of Garden # 2, A Dry Field, an Ear Plant - seem to merge with each other in an eternal struggle between figuration and abstraction, where the winner never comes. decreed. Signs were impressed with the fingers, but also with rakes and hammers until the velvet was no longer enough. Hence the need to push himself to face Meoni's only great trip to Brescia, the one up to the stables. The horse's hair had become the new surface to be marked, imprinted. After a good ride, Origin of Displacement # 1 was born.

Courtesy Palazzo Monti and Petrò Gilberti