Alfonso Leto: biographical note.
With the collaboration of Marta Sollima
“Painting is a way for not believing. It is the agnosticism of sight”.
(Alfronso Leto)
Alfonso Leto was born in 1956 in Santo Stefano Quisquina, a town in the Sicani mountains, in the hinterland of Agrigento.
In 1969 he moved to Palermo.
He first went to a fine arts high school where he was impressed by the lessons of his teachers Giovanni Agnello, Giacomo Baragli, and Disma Tumminello; he then went to the Palermo academy of fine art, of which he has fond memories of the teachers Ubaldo Mirabelli, Michele Dixit Domino, Pippo Gambino, and Franco Grasso.
It was in Palermo itself that he undertook his first steps in art.
The 1970s. His output in these years had a prevalently “fantastic” character: pencil, inks and graphite on paper undertaken in a human and productive context in which a stimulating and educational role was played by a daily exchange of ideas and friendship with artists from Palermo: Toti Garraffa, Mario Vitale, Enzo Patti, Nicolò D’Alessandro, all frequenters of Elio Cuppari’s “Il Condor” gallery and Salvino Costa’s “I Quattro Venti”.
His best known and closest cultural reference point was the “Gruppo 63”, which was mainly literary and characterized above all by the presence of Gaetano Testa. For Leto and his artist friends, he was an important reference point who suggested to them, in a frequently critical and lively polemical manner, some directions for ways and means for an approach to art and, above all, to life.
There can be pinpointed in those very years an original, youthful period in art, one defined by a number of well-known critics of the time as “Fantastic Art”, one with Neo-Surrealist roots, and that included, among Leto’s young friends, Giovanni Valenza, Nino Quartana, Enzo Onorante, Giuseppe Storniolo, and Salvatore Bignardelli.
The cultural and social circuits that most interested Leto in that period were alternative to the “official” ones of the city. Among them mention should be made of the Locanda degli Elfi, the Circolo Antorcha, the D’if workshop of the photographers Letizia Battaglia and Franco Zecchin, and the up-and-coming “indipendent radio” (the first in Palermo) Radio Pal.
The 1980s. The years of a more complex stylistic identity - one in harmony with the vivacious signals of the Transavantgardia - developed into a personal and non-emulative re-elaboration.
The years of teaching at the Palermo academy of fine arts, from 1982 to 1984. This was a teaching experience that was described by Marina Giordano in her essay for the show “Meridiani Paralleli” in which she traces out the painting scene in Palermo from the 1980s to 2000: «…It was studded with continuous and reciprocal exchanges of ideas and stimuli, of development and self-development guided by a great responsibility towards the values of painting, which in those very years was beginning to impose itself once again on the international art scene and was also reflected on that of Palermo. […] In his painting class, Leto – the youngest of the young – was to find among the other students, besides Alessandro Bazan who was soon to move to the Urbino academy, also three strong characters, three impetuous and energy-filled painters: Guido Baragli (1962), Marco Incardona (1961-1999), and Croce Taravella (1964)».
The 1990s. The period of his contact and relationship with the Roman milieu grouped around the La Nuova Presa gallery, including Felice Levini, Giuseppe Salvatori, Mariano Rossano, HH Lim, and with the Astrazione Povera artists supported by Filiberto Menna.
In these years, thanks to the fraternal guidance of Fulvio Abbate, already active in Rome as an art critic, he became part of the Roman art scene, and, on the indication of the Nuova Pesa gallery, he was invited to take part in the XLIV Premio Michetti, directed by Renato Barilli.
In this period, still following the teaching of Carbone, Leto was to increasingly develop his knowledge of creating art as well as his all-important relationship with the territory, which was not to be “mortified” by the idea of being “disadvantaged” , a prejudice linked to the idea of the market and of global homogenisation.
His work of the time was strengthened by a radical revision of expressive elements and developed to gain the intensity of a sober and minimal style that reduced, to the point of eliminating them, figurative elements; he began to concentrate on unusual materials (encaustic), the chromatic and resonant presence of natural objects (rose thorns), and various materials to bring into being his “monochrome and ventriloquist” series of canvases, (which he explained in an essay in the catalogue for his solo show at La Nuova Pesa). These works were to be followed by the “Quadreria Araldica” which developed from the series of black pictures on a material that was made iridescent by the light. In a magnificent essay, Fulvio Abbate had this to say about them: “What is certain is that these pictures are in no way bothered about safeguarding the good name of contemporaneity, they are rightly egoistic: they only think of themselves and do not question themselves about the destiny of the work. In other and prophetic words, they are beautiful and measured: I am speaking of an intellectual measure because Leto has studied them well. The result is a family of extremely literate works.”
The 1990s. His collaboration with the magazine of the La Nuova Pesa gallery, “Centoerbe”, and his friendship with Luigi Serafini. New relationships with the Sicilian art milieu, above all that represented by the innovative action of Antonio Presti (Fiumara d’Arte), Ezio Pagano, Ludovico Corrao, and the international experiences of the Fondazione Orestiadi.
In this period Leto answered the problems of IT and mass multimedia culture by developing a painting that he defined as “agnostic”, one projected beyond technological anxieties but within the visual communications of our times. In these years he published a poetic text in the Nuovi Argomenti magazine (then edited by Moravia, Siciliano, and Sciasia), together with together with others by budding Roman artists, and in some literary collections published by Flaccovio and edited by Gaetano Testa.
It was to be Leto himself who, in the Flaccovio bookshop in Palermo, presented the new literary output of a group of writer friends close to Testa (among whom Francesco Gambaro, Pippo Zimmardi, Nino Gennaro, Costantino Chillura, and Carola Susani), a presentation then transcribed and published Kalegé. He also promoted in the Agrigento hinterland events for the production and diffusion of contemporary art, and with his friends he published a newspaper of social and political criticism.
Together with his artist and intellectual friends from S. Stefano Quisquina, Antonio Greco, Ignazio Schillaci, Lorenzo Reina, and Costantino Chillura, he contributed to an independent newspaper of social criticism titled “Entroterra”, and then founded, together with Francesco Cacciatore and other friends, the Civile politically-involved movement which was to mark the beginning of an active interest in the social problems of their territory, also by promoting meetings, interventions, and texts.
He published texts and drawings in various Sicilian magazines (including Grandevù, Toga Verde, Papir, Suddovest, Fuorivista, Kalòs and many others). In his own town he was an active part of the long process of historical re-evaluation of Lorenzo Panepinto, an intellectual and the promoter of the Sicilian Workers League who was assassinated by the Mafia in 1911.
He produced works that were becoming exclusively pictorial: the series of combined painting/photography/objects; the “poets’ tax codes”, presented for a series of exhibitions supervised by Toti Garraffa in the rooms of Villa Trabia (Palermo)in the show “Opere Giovanili”, Early Works: an ironical and artificial title alluding to a perpetual and ideal youth of creativity, well told in an essay by Achille Bonito Oliva, then republished by the artist in the critical anthology “Lezioni d’anatomia: il corpo dell’arte” (publ. Kappa, Rome 1995).
The development of this output was to result in a new expressive outcome, which once again made use of figuration, where painting and drawing chat with the iconography of the internet; it was to be exhibited for the first time in the show “Leto contro il metodo”, a vast collection of recent works installed in the Case Di Stefano, curated by Achille Bonito Oliva. He was to write, “Leto’s fragmentariness is a symptom of a mentality that does not want to replace an order with another order; instead, he intends to benefit from the crisis of ideologies in order to highlight the reasons of a self that is enriched by a permanent conflict with history”.
In 1998 his work was chosen for a large exhibition at Real Albergo delle Povere, Palermo, “I percorsi del sublime”, which included works by Accardi, Consagra, Isgrò, Leto, Lo Giudice, Guccione, Salvo, and Romano (published by Electa).
He was very productive in these years, and he also actively took part in two original and important Sicilian enterprises: Ezio Pagano’s gallery (which was then to develop into a collection and a museum), and Antonio Presti’s Fiumara d’Arte and Atelier sul Mare. These were two pioneers of contemporary art who strongly defended independent artists. For Fiumara d’Arte, which acquired his work, Leto also made ceramics while in residence there.
The 2000s. “Arte Terminale”: based on an idea by Achille Bonito Oliva and which grouped together Italian artists engaged in a dialogue with multimedia languages and sensibility in a show that, after being seen in the Art Gallery Bianchi Nuovi in Rome, then toured various museums in Spain (Madrid and Salamanca) and was later seen at the Ludwig Foundation in Havana. His productive relationship with the Art Gallery Bianchi Nuovi was continued with a solo show. He was also present at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Rome with an installation. The noted British art critice Edward Lucie Smith included his work in his periodical exhibition-inquiry into painting: “Annual Development”.
His works were increasingly focussed on apocryphal visions of religion filtered through an IT sensibility that, in a solo show at the Art Gallery Bianchi Nuovi in Rome, was accompanied by an essay by Claudia Colasanti. In this Roman setting he undertook two works, “fourhanded” together with Mark Kostabi.
A freely undertaken religious element, after a “non-observant atheism” (as the artist himself defined it), increasingly became the basic element for reconstructing an aestheticising imagery that was both intense and ironic, one focussed on the relationship between religious imagery and media imagery, with works that became more exclusively painted (though he also used embroidery and grafted on objects) on the most unusual materials (as well as on canvas) such as computer screens and printed adverts; these were brought together in two separate shows: one in Palermo (“Appassionate book”, “ERSU”- University cultural center) This was followed, by a new show, “Sacrifashion”, at Enzo Mazzarella’s gallery “Monserrato Arte Novecento” in Rome, both presented by a texts of Fulvio Abbate.
He has an interesting and increasingly lively teaching activity, almost exclusively in the Bivona secondary school, as well as elsewhere in the province of Agrigento where he sets up workshops involving various means (from large-scale painting to mixed media, ceramics, developing the territory’s cultural heritage, and the use of new technologies) and that have led to his work with the students being rewarded many times over.
In 2009/2010 the Fabbriche Chiaramonte in Agrigento (a museum specialised in twentieth century art) opened, with a show by Alfonso Leto, a new series devoted to the contemporary art of the younger generations. This was the beginning of a new relationship of collaboration and cultural affinity with the museum.
In 2011 he was invited to participate in the 54th Venice Biennale (in the Sicilian region pavilion), but he refused the invitation.
From 2007 to 2014 he made the ceramic trophies for the Premio Durruti prize, awarded by Fulvio Abbate to deserving persons.
In 2015 he took part in the “Trame Mediterranee” shows in Palazzo dei Normanni, Palermo, curated by the Fondazione Orestiadi. In the same year there was exhibited “Zarathustra a Gibellina”, a large-scale installation devoted to wine, and that recuperated a quotation from Nietzsche, translated by the artist into Sicilian dialect, which was delineated in lights across a hillside near Gibellina. This installation was part of “L’Albero della Cucagna – Nutrimenti dell’Arte”, a series of installations shown across Italy, coordinated by Achille Bonito Oliva.
From 2010 to 2017 he periodically exhibited his new work in small, high-quality galleries, mainly in Palermo, in a search for an exchange of ideas and a dialogue with the young generations of artists who recognised in his work a value that was not only generational but also exemplary vitality: Zelle arte contemporanea, Spazio Cannatella, Neu/Noi, Caffè Internazionale. In 2011 he took part in the project of the Laboratorio Saccardi for the show “Casa Aut”, installed in the house of the boss Tano Badalamenti, a property confiscated from the Mafia and now the Peppino Impastato centre in Cinisi. He actively participates with texts and meetings at the magazine of the “Osservatorio Outsider Art”, coordinated by Eva Di Stefano, in the work of research and enhancement of spontaneous, clandestine, irregular artistic genius
2012, the Vincenzo Bellini conservatory hosted the show “Playlist”, the works of which evoked a close relationship with music, from that of the Baroque period to Frank Zappa to whom, in fact, two works were dedicated; the show opened in the presence of the son of the great musician, Dweezil Zappa, who was on tour in Sicily.
2014, “Passareddu artist residency” was a solo show for a poetic and adventurous enterprise born from the utopia of a group of young English people who had moved to Sicily, a genuine art outpost.
Among the many teaching activities concerning contemporary art, mention should be made of the “Lucignolo – L’arte a scuola” workshops, with the pupils at the A. Manzoni institute in Alessandria della Rocca and Bivona, a series which culminated in the show “Ritransavanguardia” at the Fondazione Orestiadi in Gibellina in 2014.
The Navarra publishing house in Palermo published his first novel “Oscurato”: an ironical tale of an artist who held a show in the noire setting of an ancient Sicilian monastery.
In 2017 he exhibited a group of new works “Rovi” (a show curated by Giuseppe Alletto) in the tower of the Fattoria dell’Arte (the Andromeda theatre), in Santo Stefano Quisquina, a town in the Sicani mountains where the artist lives and where, since 1985, the artist has taught Art and Imagery in secondary schools. His teaching is actively aimed at the promotion and diffusion of expressive sensitivity in the educational process of the youngest generations.