ALFONSO LETO
ELECTED WORKS 1977-2018
Palazzo Sant’Elia – Palermo
25 March – 29 April 2018
“Alfonso Leto, Selected Works 1977-2018” is a project of the Orestiadi Foundation, in collaboration with the Sant’Elia Foundation, which bears the authoritative signature of Marco Meneguzzo, professor at the Brera Academy in Milan and author of a detailed and documented path of studies on Sicilian artists of the second half of the twentieth century. Leto’s exhibition is part of the large program of Palermo Capital of Culture 2018.
Drawings, paintings, combine-painting, extra-artistic means, objects and conceptual use: the entire expressive alphabet of Alfonso Leto, the one declined and composed in the creative arc of forty years of activity, is on stage at the Sant’ Elia to tell the versatility and richness of techniques and expressive means of which painting is the means of choice. An investigation, the one curated by Meneguzzo, which starting from a historical shot, delivers to the new generations a complex and heterogeneous overview, within a path that – even when it resorts to other means of expression – remains faithful to himself. Memory of the past and sense of the future, in Alfonso Leto, weave the plot of a continuum always enlivened by a tension to proceed which reveals itself as a present still pregnant with originality and creative tension.
“Alfonso Leto – explains the curator, Marco Meneguzzo in the catalog – is a living scanner. An analyst of reality, of everything that occurs within his range of interest (mind you, not within his range, nor within his range of vision), and which is elaborated according to self-generating and self-generated codes. Codes, even more than languages, change quite rapidly over the years, but the aim is always the same: the coding of reality according to intelligible parameters. In fact, this is the task of the intellectual, and in fact Leto is first of all an intellectual, then an artist, because he has borrowed his reference and communicative codes from art”.
Originally from Santo Stefano di Quisquina, in the Agrigento area, where he lives and works, Alfonso Leto is often identified with the label of eclectic, surrealist, psychedelic artist. Definition that refers to the seventies and sixties. Leto does not deny: “For many of us – he explains – this fantastic painting was the only way out of the Guttusian “vulgate”, of the Guttuso-connection that had occupied the Sicilian sensibility, and with it the galleries and the market. Alongside this, as a point of reference we had – had – a strong bond with a historical figure of Group 63, Gaetano Testa, who was a teacher for me. Thanks to him I understood that the “center” is where we are, and from there we must act,
A catalog published by the Orestiadi Foundation is dedicated to the exhibition at Palazzo Sant’Elia
INFO
Inauguration: 24 March 2018, 5.30pm
Timetables:
from Tuesday to Friday from 9:30 to 18:30 (last entry at 18)
Saturday and Sunday from 10 to 13 and from 15:30 to 18:30 (last entry at 18)
Monday closed.
Tickets:
Full price €5.00
Reduced € 4.00: over 65, groups (minimum 15 people)
Schools: €3.00 per student