Inauguration: Friday 15 April, 6:00 pm

13 April - 28 May 2016

On Friday 15 April, the exhibition of the artist Federico De Leonardis will be inaugurated in Venice, in the large rooms of the Michela Rizzo Gallery on the Giudecca. Ligurian by birth and Milanese by adoption, this sculptor has always worked on the space that hosts him. His is a search for the delicate balance between presence and absence, where the former is always entrusted to remains, scraps, traces of energy events developed elsewhere and the latter to the automatic memory common to all of us. The study that Donata Feroldi is conducting on him is extremely significant in the work of this artist. We reproduce an extract below:
“What do we live today in the Western world, but could we easily say everything in the world now? A great emptiness that no one wants to look at because emptiness is frightening because emptiness speaks of death because it speaks of loneliness, speaks of precariousness, speaks of being born, speaks of dying, of everything we don't want to talk about and don't want to talk about. we want to take care. What is the reaction in the face of this great void? Fill it, as the French say, de n'importe quoi, no matter what, as long as we fill it. So here we replicate the existing with an echo that has repercussions to infinity, here is the museum, not as the place of attention, but as a replica, here is history as a study of repetition, of the multiplication of today in the past and here consumerism as an endless repetition of the most absolute, unrepeatable, unique act of man, the act is done for the other man, in the uniqueness of the moment that lives it (and not by chance produces another man), and finally here are the by-products of this filling spreading everywhere to suffocate us even in the depths of the Sahara. The do ut des, the very negation of the human, the very negation of generosity, is at the origin of this emptiness. Even art today participates in this great event: in subjectivism, in formal originality, it too finds an alibi for filling the void. It is no longer generous, it is no longer transgressive.
But art cannot renounce its main task of the pain of its own death: art is generous violence, "an axe to break the sea of ​​ice that is within us" (Kafka). What is your first, essential task today? Give us to see this void.