Renato Leotta

Renato Leotta’s art may be described as a personal diary in which each installation is a chapter recounting the experience of a specific place. In his exhibitions, each single work is part of a web of connections that aim to depict a landscape and certain historical events that took place there. The artist describes his work as “simulations of promenades” that he reconstructs into heterogeneous fragments using a “mise en abyme” structure similar to hypertextual writing. Through his creative process, he transposes a lived experience into a text, which is itself filled with references and allusions to other writings. This is then translated freely into a small collection of sculptures, photographs, film and drawings.

The installation at the Fondazione Morra Greco in Naples shows city scenes (the gardens of the Real Villa di Chiaia and the Palazzo delle Poste rationalist building) interwoven with images of an aquarium, photographic views and abstract representations of a journey to Capri, all of which enter into dialogue with a Sol Lewitt wall drawing. Leotta builds connections between geography – understood etymologically as writing and representing earthly landscapes – and biographical, literary, historical, political and cultural information. His ambition is to create a personal atlas, annotated with facts and perceptions of particular importance, almost as if to suggest a conceptual and abstract version of today’s smartphones and their “augmented reality.” During his hypothetical promenades, the landscape is filtered and transformed to become an intertextual, cross-disciplinary tale. When seen in succession, his exhibitions give the impression of four-dimensional roadmaps: they exist not only in space but must be read according to a specific time sequence that the artist regulates choreographically, using a timer to set off lighting and projectors at specific moments. His exhibitions are to be approached as documentaries removed from their territorial context, which, rather than representing space and time in linear sequence as recorded on a conventional film, translate perceptions into objects and images arranged in the exhibition’s own unique spatial-temporal continuum.

Francesco Manacorda