Leonardo Meoni

Amanita is pleased to present I Used to Be a Mountain, Leonardo Meoni's second solo exhibition in New York.

Leonardo Meoni (b. 1994, Florence) works with a strongly material approach. His 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. 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.

Leonardo lives and works in Prato, Italy.

"I Used To Be

I used to be a mountain,

before being a parallelepiped,

this long word,

these lines before your eyes;

before being this metal smeared by the caresses of your intent from

the last twenty-four hours – what is a day

your life

next to the billions of years that shaped me?

– (the low-ranking angel that appears in an Enzensberger poem says: nothing adds

more than feldspar and the Large Magellanic Cloud)

–, well, I used to be an ore;

before

being these figures against the grain, this story against the grain

that light and a gesture and a few meters of distance finally reflect, I

used to be a cocoon; before

being this fold, this scratch that your crystalline lens tries to fix on the retina I

used to be

a memory, a fright, a sigh of L. M. that you, you all try,

try to read.

Try, try, because after all who today will read the mountains, who? and the

ores, who will read them? the cocoons, fragile cocoons, are they read?

For how long one can today imagine nonetheless

we were nothing

nothing more than a long

a long silence. But how could one think that we could ever fit

into the word:

silence.

Before being here not to speak of mountains, ores, mysteries

and silk cocoons;

before I used to be

an epic poem; a philosophy treatise, an epistle, a litany

well before a ballad, a novel, an idyll

well, well before a chant, a day,

if day existed,

an epiphany

who will read me? who,

who will read the mountain? the mountain camouflaged as stone,

the mountain camouflaged as bridge, camouflaged as floor, camouflaged as

heavy bird

the mountain camouflaged as nightmare,

the mountain camouflaged as pedestal – what landscape is this?

–

the mountain camouflaged as word

m-o-u-n-t-a-i-n

the mountain riding on the wings of other tongues

montagne; berg; montaña; montanha; un matin

it dawned

no longer being a mountain; the ore

dressed up as desires (of gold, silver, copper, bronze – words that shine)

opaque, but also as jewel,

as sword,

as fork and knife, as blade,

as ruins or

paintings

pretending to be lovers of a certain L. M.

smeared by pure ink pretending

to be the sweat of what we call

man;

and still cocoons camouflaged as a vast and luxurious green

velvet resisting touch

only at some points

so that one may glimpse

the idea resisting the mutilation of this page

brief, the idea polished

by these mere

words, the idea

pretending to be someone’s dream, does someone remember? I try to

remember; the idea playing the role of a correspondence between New York and

São Paulo,

to be a figure and leap

seven

thousand

and

six hundred

and

eighty

kilometers high

– if we believe the maps, other fictions [look closely, they are

mountains bathing in the oceans] –

from a painting to this screen

playing at being paper

to be crumpled and maybe thrown away through the window

and there, out there, there is still a mountain, mountains

of things watching us

from the peaks of their existences

and then we are

silence."

—Natasha Belfort Palmeira