Leonardo Meoni

Amanita is pleased to present A Glimpse, Almost, Leonardo Meoni’s solo exhibition in Los Angeles. This is Meoni’s third solo show with Amanita.

A glimpse, almost

First, there was the idea of a glimpse. And immediately after, there was the thought of an invisible boundary. In these latest works, the images live, and with them, live also their surroundings. Through a continuous repositioning of the dichotomous planes to which we have been educated: good/evil, beautiful/ugly, revealing/concealing — the dynamic devices (velvets) have shifted with a visual interest: an emptying of the center.

In my latest work, the priority of content removes the emphasis from the center of the picture; the subject, still present, remains a point of reference, but for divergence.

In an expansion or regression of vision, common to the mechanics of the photographic lens, the understated flowers discharge the taboos of things familiar to us but not fully known. The charm by which the flower is remembered, made extinct, or forgotten, transforms what could be frustratingly banal in a photograph, now into something filled with mystery.

Streams of color enclose the central scene where the palette is limited to only tones and undertones. The suggestion presents a tension between presence and absence - the negative space can imply that something is leaving, or on the other hand, arriving - challenging the visual perception. The pictorial incident becomes more pronounced by the margins of the work, which build curtains that lend ambiguity to the scene: the narrowing alludes to an end and a dissolution.

The scenes glimpsed between the curtains are incomplete, sending only signals — images that do not allow for planned conclusions and meaning.

I am addicted to images: there is too much light, there are too many useless images, there is a kind of fiction, a masquerade all around us. I can only lose myself and fall in love with images hidden and obscured.

—Leonardo Meoni

Leonardo Meoni (b.1994, Florence) studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti of Florence and Accademia di Belle Arti of Brera and has participated in various collective exhibitions and projects, in Italy and internationally. Working with a strongly material approach, Leonardo Meoni’s works are rooted in a three-dimensional corporeality. In close contact with the precepts of pictorial art, time, representation and gestures, Meoni empathically blurs the boundaries between genres and artistic practices by existing in an intermediate space between painting, sculpture, and drawing, emphasizing in his work the contamination of practices and different concepts towards universal hybridization. Meoni’s works are the result of a performative gesture and are presented as monochromatic velvet canvases with an intimate cut, rich in shades that give organicity to the composition. In a material game of action and subtraction, a temporality marked by the artist’s movement is added to the three dimensional aspect of his works. The velvet, by absorbing the light, returns an ambiguous image, like a primordial photograph in which the control of the glare is subject to the surrounding elements and not to the precision of the medium, creating a figure that opposes easy visibility.

Meoni has upcoming institutional shows at Museo Bardini in Florence curated by Sergio Risaliti and at the Sandra & Giancarlo Bonollo Foundation in Thiane (VI) curated by Marta Papini. Leonardo lives and works in Prato, Italy.