A fluid and open figuration, not constrained by the narrow confines of a form but spontaneously generated from a free association, distinguishes the painting of Leopoldo Innocenti, a Florentine young artist, represented by Galleria d’arte La Fonderia.
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Leopoldo Innocenti born in Florence in 1994. Here he frequented the Academy of Fine Art earning a master’s degree in Pictorial Arts. He specialized in graphic-pictorial works electing paper as his favourite medium.
Intimately linked to the earth and greenery, a colour that frequently recurs in his palette, the painter's studio communicates directly with his garden. Over time, such a synergy has been established between the two environments that we could assume this small plot of land as an integral part of the artist’s creative process. As Leopoldo Innocenti admits, when he paints, it is as if he were preparing the soil to be able to plant the seed of his painting, which then grows spontaneously and autonomously, just like whichever plant. The artist fertilizes the soil with mental images that are visually translated into pictorial gestures; he grafts some elements onto those already present, thus allowing the painting to expand; he prunes others, where the composition risks suffocating; he waters the whole abundantly to ensure an energetic and disruptive growth.
In particular, this last process is obtained using a very liquid colour, produced by the artist himself and based on pure pigment, that sometimes is left to drip directly onto the support, to allow paper, which has always been the artist's favourite medium, to actively participate to the final result. By moving, wrinkling, and even dissolving in some portions, the paper itself irreversibly alters the indistinct and stratified amalgam of a psychic nature that is offered to the observer's gaze and induces him to be involved.
The artist pours his thoughts, emotions, obsessions and memories accumulated over time into his work. They unexpectedly occupy the space, sometimes giving rise to daring and cryptic associations that materialize to the eye in the guise of an enigmatic mosaic of the unconscious. The artist's interiority often turns into a vast collection of recurring images, directly extrapolated from his own experience or emerging from the most hidden corners of his psyche. Wolves with a menacing gait, confused flights of pigeons, bizarre banana trees (the same ones that can be seen from the window of his studio), street vendors or perfect strangers emerge, freely associated, from a composition articulated on several levels that has a lot in common with the structured complexity of an ecosystem. The images overlap, they chase each other as in an excited dream, they trespass into each other, by getting contaminated. The form doesn’t hold up and falls apart, now drying itself in rigid and nervous poses, now dissolving into the background.
Leopoldo Innocenti paints lands that he has contaminated, and he opens to a plurality of meanings that do not claim to be exhaustive, let alone univocal reading. Rather, his painting reflects those same natural processes which, although they have always occurred in the world, in a cyclical and completely random way, nevertheless produce unique and unrepeatable effects. We all participate in it personally, as active witnesses; his paintings, changeable and ineffable, just happen.
Cover image: Leopoldo Innocenti, In riva all’Arno, 2019, courtesy of Galleria d’arte La Fonderia
Written by Mattia Lapperier
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