Si può illuminare un cielo melmoso e nero?

Magazzino Gallery - Roma — 2020
16/09 - 24/10

Why lighten it? A sky which is “muddy and black” is already filled with dark lights, with shadows that gather, with obscure depths, it is a very present sky, looming, raw and tactile. It already has, within it, all the lights and all the shadows, it catches the colours in the swamp of its greys,  it lays its gaze in the depth of its blacks. Such a sky is already bright, it turns on with a whispered light, forcing the eyes to close, the thought to concentrate, and the image to show its physical sensibility. Everything merges and boils in the incombent mud above our heads. A “muddy and black” sky is a a large, opaque mirror that reflects all the things. Only in these overturned lands, on these suspended metal sheets, one can grasp the flashes of a sharp colour, a recall of an antique painting, one which is cultivated, sophisticated and elegant. It is inside the creases of these metal sheets that Francesca Leone hides her colours, it is in the darkness of the Carte that the artist lays the lights of her painting. It is here, in this rusty sky, that Francesca Leone brings the characters of her narrative: the greens, the blues, the reds and the yellows, are the enlightened pictorial characters that draw a new story, discover new tales under the grey of the ashes. It is a tale in which the memory of the painting emerges, in which the emotion of the colour vibrates, where it is possible to recognise the art of Francesca Leone, a story able to lacerate even that “darkness denser than pitch”.