MONADE by Federico Lombardo

From 07/05/2018 To 15/06/2018

The personal exhibition of Federico Lombardo is entitled "Monade", which will present 15 paintings and 15 works on paper made specifically for the exhibition. More than ten years after the last Milanese solo show, held in the Italian Painting gallery directed by Federico Rui,
after having exhibited at the Pac of Milan, in the Palladian Basilica of Vicenza, at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, in the Biennials of
Venice and Sharjah and the Rome Quadrennial, the artist questions the value of painting today. Making Munch's crudity realism
of Hopper, it gives us back the life that surrounds it. In contrast to the coldness of a monitor and the speed of communication,
it dwells on scenes of lived life, like postcards or images of memories. "Monade" is a term used by Pythagoras and then by Aristotle to indicate the principle from which the numbers, entities and the four derive elements. In Plato's Dialogues it is used as a synonym for ideas. In the philosophy of G. W. Leibniz (1696) the monad is nothing else. What a simple substance that enters the compounds, that is to say, simple without parts: each monad is independent of the others and in each one reflects the whole universe that it expresses according to its position. More generally, it can be said that, while the term atom in both its physical and metaphysical meaning implies only a bodily or material aspect, the monad, as a rule, it always implies something incorporeal, spiritual, or even vital. In this sense the research of Federico Lombardo is monad, solitary, reflective, unaware part of a greater whole. In this exhibition, the artist fundamentally reappropriates painting, even if - he states - in the traditional sense of the term, the painting no longer exists. It does not exist if it is intended exclusively as a means, as a simple method of representing the real. Instead, he finds his raison d'etre if he approaches a conceptual reflection on the world and on man: the very act of painting is a method of knowing reality, that is, as Picasso said, revolutionizing the history of figurative art, "painting is
a blind profession: one does not paint what he sees, but what he feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen."