Paolo Leonardo
Turin, 1973Lives and works in Turin
Trained at the Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti, he has been active in Turin since the mid-1990s. His pictorial work represents a challenge to the contemporary media system and a research based on the interaction between painting and photography. His first interventions focused on posters affixed in the city, through which the artist initiated a creative process, aimed at overturning the meanings and codes of the advertising system: “One night I tore down two large posters, one a man's face and one a woman's face, and after having modified them with a pictorial intervention, in an expressionist style, I abusively placed them back in the advertising street displays.”
In recent years, Leonardo has returned to an analogue dimension of the image, through a choice of materials on which to work. In the new series of works Rossi (2022), ink on photographic print, the artist chooses photographs in which the image is distorted, erased and chromatically flattened by colour. In the Gold series (2023) it is the female figure that is central; these are images of women's bodies recovered by the Association for Historical Photography, the originals of which date back to the 1870s and 1880s. The last cycle is the Blue (2024), in which the format is larger and the medium varies from canvas to paper.
Recent solo exhibitions include:
In 2019 ‘Solo da bambini’ (with Lina Fucà and Daniele Gaglianone) at the Fondazione Merz (Turin); in 2020 ‘Comment ça va’ at Raffaella De Chirico contemporary art (Turin); in 2022 ‘Altri occhi’ at the Galleria Alessandro Bagnai (Foiano della Chiana, Arezzo); in 2024 ‘Resurfacing Erasures’ at Raffaella De Chirico contemporary art (Milan).
His work can be found in various private and public collections in Italy and abroad.