Rediscovering Oliviero Leonardi’s Art: Exploring Chronicles of Future

by Katarina Đošan

In contrast to Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform absolute time. He believed in an infinite series of times in a growing dizzying net of divergent, convergent, and parallel times. This network of times, which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time.
Jorge Louis Borges, Labyrinths

Oliviero Leonardi (1921 – 2019) is an artist lost in time. His efforts, art beliefs, innovative art techniques, numerous exhibitions, ideas, friends, and critics, namely his work and art as a whole, were almost completely forgotten. Thanks to the efforts of the Association Oliviero Leonardi, his legacy, preserved in France (where his life partner is from), is slowly coming back to life. It should be noted that Leonardi detached from the world of art on his own and slowly started creating art for himself. Self-absorbance, the meditative and silent life he chose after the glory he experienced in the 70s and 80s, seems quite contradictory. As his name resurfaces, the meaning of it, the context behind it, the story of it – strongly tied to his art – tries to meet the surface too. Is art prone to such resurrections given its connection to history and society? Is it possible for art to reappear in a meaningful way? His art, especially from the 70s, speaks a very different language from the language of contemporary art. Oliviero Leonardi is, to make this more complicated, not the one who even then produced art we expect from the 70s: no conceptual art, performance, arte povera, postmodern art, or pop art. He is a ‘postmodern modernist,’ in some instances even an avant-garde artist, the one that is at the same time inspired by the modern past (futurism, constructivism, cubism) and innovative future (new media and robotics). He was, even at that moment, everything but a contemporary artist; Gustav Rene Hocke claims that he belongs to the group of artists that are actually new mannerists: self-centered, acting as observers, thinkers, introverts; in a way, they are not belonging. But the most striking thing about his art is the fact that he ceased to connect past and future in a timeless way. How? By being aware of the omnipresence of the cosmos – cosmos as both time and space. Being aware of the energy ever-changing yet ever-present. By seeking constants in changes (and seeing changes as constants). By tracing the primordial – in the future. How do we meet our resting ancestors in our descendants? By finding forms opened as cosmos; the energy hugging us from the center. How do we recognize descendants in fossils? By enclosed forms of life yet to be reached. He cleverly used closed forms for the future that is present in the past (to be opened when the time is right) and he presented wide images of the future long as shadows of ancestors. Before born, life hugs itself; the beginning is hard (therefore it needs protection). Once dead, the body is opened wide; it calmly rests in itself. Leonardi’s instinctive knowledge of life and death, past and future, his perplexing image of life given to us in simple forms as visible truths – is precious for us today when we call ourselves courageous when daring to follow our instincts.

The art of Oliviero Leonardi helps us grasp this instinctive knowledge of life as a whole, which Hegel perfectly described in his Phenomenology of Spirit: “The bud disappears in the bursting-forth of the blossom and one might say that the former is refuted by the latter; (…) Yet at the same time their fluid nature makes them moments of organic unity in which they not only do not conflict but in which each is as necessary as the other; and this mutual necessity alone constitutes the life of the whole.”

Opened and closed forms as forms of death and life, future and past, ends and beginnings take the central stage of Leonardi’s work. Hocke, in his monograph on Leonardi, informed readers that critics insisted on contradictions in his work; it was obvious to him, who knew Leonardi and his art very well, that those contradictions can be read only in the Hegelian sense. If looking closely at his three series of important works from the 70s and 80s – Pamphili, Prima, and Sistina – this duality becomes obvious. Some works, like “Tuareg,” “Uomo Cosmico” (“Cosmic Man”), “Memoria” (“Memory”), or “Disegno Cosmico” (“Cosmic Design”), are given in enclosed energy-full forms, ready to use that energy in creation. This is the energy of the embryo (new), but also of fossils (old). “Memory,” depicting procreation and young love, already means the past. “Uomo Cosmico” is not even a man but the process of becoming a man. It is given without form, in motion, in creation. The similarity between his ‘enclosed works’ and the works of avant-garde artists from the beginning of the century is obvious. Some drawings of Naum Gabo, a Russian constructivist artist, take similar forms but without the holy contradiction. That contradiction is further enhanced by depicting processes and motion, something that reminds us strongly of his older Futurist colleagues. His work “Espressione di una potenza aldila dello spazio-tempo” ("Expression of a power beyond space-time”) is nothing else than a two-dimensional homage and comment on Umberto Boccioni’s famous sculpture “Forme uniche della continuità nello spazio” (“Unique Forms of Continuity in Space,” 1913) as both the title and its visuality confirm. While futurists like Boccioni or Fortunato Depero, who became good friends to Leonardi, were repulsed by anything old, traditional, religious, or metaphysical, seeing time and space as constants and objective truths (or taking objective clues about its non-constant nature), Leonardi 60 years later believes in power or ‘Potenza’ beyond what is ‘objective.’ Time for Leonardi is non-linear; forms are both primordial and futuristic; the past will happen again; Odyssey and spaceships are more similar than we think (In Hocke’s opinion, the cult movie of 1968 probably inspired the artist).

That was unthinkable for futurists for whom only the future remained fast, new, and continuous as a line. The stability of constructivist thought was definitely unbelievable after the war. Subjectivity arose, and interest in the occult, magical, personal, dissonance, and the future close to us—the one we dreamed of—became prominent. In Leonardi’s art, new is seen through the lenses of old, future through past. His work is religious in a way some Christians use Psalms in prayers to save not only future generations but also generations before them. As Psalms for them, his paintings also represent prayers for our ancestors in reverse. We imagine distant past in the same way we imagine far future; the brain can’t tell the difference. For Leonardi, this dance of past and future constitutes the essence of cosmogony, which becomes obvious in his own explanation of the work “Cosmogonia”: “In cosmogony all cultural models correlate epochs and researches integrate excesses and defects, pains, judgments, evolved civilizations and primitive ones. And all as if enucleated around an egg, the universal at the origin, the alpha that contains the omega within and rediscovers it finally with a leap of consciousness or arid fury when existence concludes a cycle and inexorably passes from life to death which regenerates”.

In this interplay of life and death, he was very interested in (“Macabre Dance” is the most direct work of his concerning the question of death and the afterlife, showing the medieval idea of dance at the end of life) new forms that arose, opened forms, the wide legs of death, the peace of it. Works like “Robot di un Planeta” (“Robot of a Planet”), “L’uomo Laser” (“The Laser Man”), “Incarnazione in un Robot Galattico” (“Incarnation Into A Galactic Robot”), or “Volto dell’ Infinito” (“Face of the Infinity”) all share this tendency to overcome the borders of a steel plate they belong to. In abstract works, the means of dynamic lines and angles are at work, similar to futuristic compositions; in figural works such as “Face of The Infinity” or “Vincent e Teo” (“Vincent and Theo”), the face is given as if expanding over the painting, as if the space of the painting is not enough to present the image wanted. In most of his artworks, we can see borders, angles, and particles of forms we recognize, or we can connect to it through the title and thus become close to it as we still need this closeness today. Leonardi’s work is almost always connected to human experience and in that way readable; Picasso-like lines and faces of his depicted objects are still recognizable no matter what form of distortion they belong to (from cubistic distortions to stylization and lines that flow on their own). The influence of Picasso is very strong through mastering naivety, and the artist admits it by paying homage to him in one of his paintings as the title suggests. But his abstract art is, in a way, his most radical form, the form in which he took the most from himself in terms of creativity and imagination (‘abstract surrealism’ as Hocke put it). His vast spaces of nothing put imagination at play; here “nature as enigma” opens its arms; here we meet “Fires, blood, oceans, skies, unspeakable whiteness, electric discharges, blinding concentrations prepare the destiny of an individual far from being closed finally in the protective ovum”.

His abstractions are in that way neither open forms exploring death nor closed forms interested in life-making. They are rather places made for that to happen; we imagine them as spaces from planets to cities to galleries and finally to laps of extra-terrestrial beings. Is his “Galleria Rinascimentale Spaziale” (“Space Renaissance Gallery”) from the future or from the past? Time and space are very fluid for the artist. It seems that he simply did not accept life as presented to us – the ordinary life of continuity, geography, gravity, and history. Even in terms of art, he refused to make paintings as we know it. His invented medium consists of metal enameling – but instead of glass, he uses self-made colors burnt into steel plates, giving the ceramic look once it cools those “mixtures of volcanic fire, old silver, palm green, deathly black, and the unblemished white of lilies and narcissi”. To achieve that, he burnt colors on high fire (900C), giving the whole process a traditional but alchemical quality. Fire burns everything both physically and metaphysically; it brings clean starts, it brings palimpsest to its whiteness, to the imagined beginning. It is interesting to see that this kind of art experimenting with medium is often tied to Italian artists, to soil where artistic history is so overwhelming and omnipresent (as is the case with Futurists or later with his famous colleague Alberto Burri, for example). Metal, fire, dynamism, and burnt – with an imagination that is both tied to imagined pre-history and after-future (in Leonardi’s case, that leaves history and its linearity as it leaves space and its three-dimensionality) act as a connection between these different artists. That art-without-history connection ironically constitutes another history of art. Oliviero Leonardi takes an important place in that history. Once his name is known again, his work will take an important place in the arts future.

References

[1] Borges, Jorge Luis. "The Garden of Forking Paths" in Labyrinths ed. Donald Yates and James Irby. New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1962.

[2] https://oliviero-leonardi.com/

[3] Hocke, Gustav René. Urbilder der Phantasie. Oliviero Leonardi und die Vision archetypischer Formen des Lebens

(Translated to english without title, Legacy of Oliviero Leonardi), 1978.

[4] Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. The phenomenology of spirit. Oxford University Press, 1977.