There was a time, when it was said, almost as if it were a guillotine, from now onContinuing with, by now, we are beyond the frame, by now we are beyond painting, by now everything is conceptual (while Pino Pinelli stated: painting painting), theatrical gesturing, far from visually pure. No one can complain about this, provided that the schematic anymore, replace a Also. The art of our time lives for this reason, and when I say our time, I mean the last fifty years, which are still comprehensible within a concept of contemporaneity, which is not in itself a diachrony, but a synchrony, an elective affinity. Giovanni Leto belongs to this special era and temporality, a departure from pictorialism, not from painting, a transition to material abstraction made with paper, treated in various ways and elevated to an expressive multiplicity, a fusion of conceptualised manuality and expressive intonation, a fusion of emotional gesturality and an expansive, spatial intonation, in all directions, of the pictorial and the architectural. Giovanni Leto, from his base in Bagheria, a city of Guttuso, Provino, Tornatore, Dacia Maraini, Scianna, near Ezio Pagano's Museum, has left us a lesson Invoice of absolute refinement, because he did not limit himself at all to a humoral informalisation of chance and necessity, but guided all his works towards a fantastic model, which is the dialectical antithesis of technology, and not because he was a traditionalist, albeit an abstract one, but because he had to claim a real autonomy for art, a non-prescribability of a consumerist grammar.
His entire oeuvre, interspersed with deep meditation which then guided his poetic alphabet, presents itself to us as a vast labyrinth of sweetness, without matrices. others, that were not those of anthropological and historical memory. In him there was always an alternative mirrored reflection to the blushing sulfureity of our outward nature, which he tempered with an emergence of white, as a distinctive sign of spatiality, experienced as intimacy. We did not see each other much, but the sense of his scripturality, of his equipping himself with a sign, which today I would call by another, more complex name, a metaphor for a poetics of temperance and research, has always remained alive within me. A fully-fledged artist, who comes from a provincial post-Guttuso sensibility, never rejected, but always evoked as a spectacular symptom of diversity. As if to say that in Bagheria the air is clear and many flowers can bloom and many schools can compete. One of these was him, the man from Monreale, who made Bagheria his own Paris, his own Montmartre, receiving in the prize of his solitude an inspiration linked, yes, to Giardina and Buttitta, but an eagle, free, proud, regal.
KLESSIDRA | EDITED BY FRANCESCO GALLO MAZZEO
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