citazioni critiche | ArchivioAlfonsoLeto

Quotations from a critical anthology

Giuseppe La Monica, from “Due ventenni coerenti”, “L’Ora” newspaper, Palermo, April 1979 (review of the show “Alfonso Leto e Giovanni Valenza” at the I Quattro Venti gallery, Palermo; text republished in “Il Figurativo alle soglie degli anni Ottanta”) Accademia Pontano, Naples; Galleria d’arte Moderna, Palermo: “L’Ora” newspaper, Palermo, 1979)

[…] Myths and their ambiguous dissonance, the imagination and an awareness of fantasy, icons and their similar/dissimilar alter ego, evocative magic and its alienating displacement are all conveniently coexistent in the works by Alfonso Leto. […] Leto’s art, which in a certain sense is unusual, is fascinating and imposes close evaluation for its ideological rigour, which is essential for the coherence of the art which never loses itself in the widespread flirting of mediocre taste. […]

Francesco Carbone, from "Leto o della nuova pittura", in Alfonso Leto, Accademia di Belle Arti, Palermo, 1981.

[…] And it is in the splendid painting by Alfonso Leto that the figure, so intense, takes on an eccentric and particular appearance, fascinatingly played out through fantasy and imagination. This distinction is not a lazy one, given that the fantasy of his most recent painting does not allow it to be defined as “the mad woman in the house” […] but, instead, it produces a different creative intelligence, a personal way of rendering the “maximum good”, as Novalis said. […]

Cesare Sermenghi, from “Testimone Inverso” in Alfonso Leto, Accademia di Belle Arti, Palermo, 1981

[…] In his work Il Soffio, Alfonso Leto shows a modern Aeolus who in himself is sufficient to represent the artist, and not just as in self-portrait, but here where he is entrenched in the door of a light-filled setting (his own existence); and over the rest of the world, that is in shadow, he blows a great, enlivening gust of colour. Transfigured in this way, the artist wants to experience, as though on a William Blake-like mission, the Fiat Lux of the first creation in a world that, sadly, is still in the darkness of so many imperfections”.

Achille Bonito Oliva, from : "Il fagotto dell'arte" in: 'Alfonso Leto' , published by the S. Stefano Quisquina town council, 1987.

[…] Alfonso Leto uses language as a tool that can create a catastrophic breakdown of the balance of social communication. The sensitivity of this Sicilian artist has a character linked to typically Mediterranean anthropological roots, blaanced between movement and contemplation, eroticism and a sense of death, nature and language. […]

Costantino Chillura, from “Alfonso Leto”, Associazione culturale Voltaire, edited by Toti Garraffa, Palermo, 1987

[…] From the chilly humus there is originated a conjunction of low elements and high codes, of faded moustaches and Kandinsky, Diderot and decorative lintels, the jokes of curtain-raisers and Klee, Klein and the canvases of troubadours, lambs’ bones and the fake cranium of Beuys … There is a joking quid pro quo in this waiting for and disregarding of an occasion every time it is defined.

Francesca Alfano Miglietti, from : "Lo stile tradito", solo show, Associazione Culturale Voltaire, Palermo, 1988

[…] Alfonso Leto’s work finds its way through singular developments, and each new work is unable to give rise to a “series” because its procedures, each time, question the preceding work, quite apart from the object that has been revealed. […] His works leave it to us to guess his ungraspable vision, the distance of his style, the incessant movement from the particular to the universal, and vice versa; by portraying what is not reassuring and the inauthentic, they distance themselves from the wretched certainties of a vision that is always the same. […]

Sergio Troisi, from “Made in Palermo”, published by Palermo city council-Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna, Palermo, 1984

[…] Aware of the truth in Jean Dubuffet’s idea that art is to be found where it is not looked for, Alfonso Leto acts astutely and intelligently in a territory opened by the simulation and storytelling of styles, materials, and languages. With the mastery of someone who knows – and he knows because he knows them deeply – how to make and dismantle the codes of communication. […]

Toti Garraffa from: “Diavolini in convento”, Sicilian magazine of the Greens, n. 20 , 1987

[…] Fofò, who does not know how to lie, cannot repeat himself or his painting, objects, things in front of us, and he continues in the collective, iconological, and phenomenological memory, to infinity. A pictorial power who can absorb Mannerism or spread into researches into space, turn to material or to the abstraction of gestures with the completeness of his images. […]

Renato Barilli, from “Rentrée”, Premio marche 1993, Ancona (edizioni Mazzotta, Milan)

[…]The Sicilian Alfonso Leto, well known to the Roman milieu as a result of the Nuova Pesa gallery, has interesting ways of thinking that allow him to create a museum of personal finds, that he packs one inside the other and exhibits on the wall. […]

Fulvio Abbate , from "Il campionario del Paradiso”, solo show by A.L. at the La Nuova Pesa gallery, Rome, 1991

[…] Now I know that Leto, due to his nature as a complex Sicilian, as a Sicilian who is always thinking, has arrived at this painting of few things by way of a wide, and above all contradictory, path; a path that has seen him pay attention to the main linguistic phases of art history, from Mannerism to Dada. And he has finally – but this is a temporal finally, finally until now – arrived at these works that have the simple and immediate value of a revelation. […]

Barbara Tosi, from “Giovani Artisti IV” (publ. carte Segrete), an exhibition at Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, 1992.

[...] In the small-scale canvases that his recent work consists of, there is just one subject: heraldry. But its developments and combinations are numerous, to the point of defining a kind of huge mosaic populated by tesserae. […] The artist’s poetics are hermetic, but it is painting itself that defines this disposition, it being, of all the plastic arts, the most finalised one and developed by undertaking an inevitably local existence, for which it needs many and relatively complicated languages. […]

Achille Bonito Oliva, from "Abuso dell'arte e inerzia della forma" in "Lezioni d'anatomia: il corpo dell'arte", publ. Kappa, Rome, 1995

[…] Alfonso Leto develops an art aimed at the construction of an existential resistance and a formal duration. To do this he sterilises objects and images in a composition that brings together memories of the present and tautologies of objects from the spheres of nature and culture. […] To go beyond Duchamp means accepting Heidegger’s statement that “the terrible has already happened”. Leto starts from an awareness of such terribleness and historically and lucidly accepts the sterility of art. […]

Stefano Chiodi, from “Oscar”, group show at “La Nuova Presa”, Castello Colonna, Genazzano, 1997

[…] The work by Alfonso Leto is nourished by facing and creating tension with current overwhelming mass production through his solitary discipline as a painter; the dominant note of his work seems to be a kind of andante ostinato able to draw on the most heterogeneous figurative sources and to enclose them in a highly perfected system of formal relationships. […]

Maria Grazia Torri, Nuovo Paesaggio Italiano, Spazio Consolo, Milan, Lupetti editore, 1998

[…] The demiurgic artist Alfonso Leto touches the skeletons of his connective objects and populates the nights of our electrical circuits with tin stars, interpreted as galaxies: cosmic backgrounds that are inscrutable to our calm eyes, used as they are to the monotonous clicking of beeps. […]

Claudia Colasanti, "12 ICONE DAL BAZAR MEDIOLOGICO" from “Misteri gaudiosi”, solo show, Art Gallery Banchi Nuovi, Rome, 2000

[…] Alfonso Leto captures the thoughts of Time, his time, by patiently constructing an interminable telematic structure by way of a complex painting consisting of unresolved rebuses, pictures opening within other pictures, against backgrounds that can be decorative, abstract or descriptive (for example, such accessories as women’s shoes) and are saturated with colours that seem to be infinite. Curtains on which there are clearly outlined by pencil lines the shapes of apparently happy families, where even the domestic animals have a halo. […] It is the path to faith by shameless mysticism. […]

Jenny Dibert in NEW EUROPEAN ARTIST, curated by Edward Lucie Smith, published by “Imprinta Publishing Projects”- Amsterdam, 2001

Leto the agnostic constantly deals with religious and mystical subjects. He once said in an interview, “For me spirituality is not a question of faith but of research, a purely linguistic question, given that I believe that the soul is nothing other than the language inherent in all things”. And so he makes good use of the teaching of the masters of the past, who often contradicted or avoided the expectations of their clients, despite their use of sacred subjects. […]

Marina Giordano, from “Meridiani-Paralleli, percorsi d’arte a Palermo, anni ’80-2000”, published by the town council of Castelbuono and by the Associazione Fiumara d’Arte; Castelbuono (Palermo), 2006

[…] Leto’s painting in the early 1980s was attuned to a radically Postmodern spirit, where the mixture of languages and the almost uncontainable versatility of invention – which led to him being defined as “an incurable tightrope-walking painter disposed to traverse every territory, even beyond the limits of history” – felt the wave of the Trans-avant-garde, and where the codes of the historical avant-gardes, of Expressionism, and of Surrealism were mixed together with open hilarity. […]

Emanuela Tripodo in “70/06 QUATTRO ARTISTI SICILIANI Rosario Bruno Gaetano Denaro Carlo Lauricella Alfonso Leto”, graduation essays for the degree course in the art disciplines of music and performance; supervisor Prof. Eva Di Stefano, Palermo University, faculty of literature and philosophy

[…] Together with him, and like him, were artists at the beginning of their activity but who had already formed a recognisable identity, such as Mario Vitale, Enzo Patti, Giovannino Valenza and, above all, Toti Garraffa, the real animator of the moment. We should also remember the environment of dialogue and comparisons that Garraffa favoured in the period when he directed Elio Cuppari’s Il Condor gallery, together with the group of intellectuals and writers who gathered around, firstly the “Fasis” magazine, and then “Approssimazione”, published by Flaccovio and edited by Gaetano Testa, an exponent of the Gruppo 63.

Among the personalities of that period and context (some of whom are still alive and kicking) mention should be made of Michele Perriera, Letizia Battaglia, Fulvio Abbate and others. […]

Carla Caserta in “LETO- ATTANASIO- BRANCATO” graduation thesis in contemporary art history for the department of humanistic sciences, Catania University; supervisor Prof. Giuseppe Frazzetto

[…] After a debut marked by a psychedelic and fantastic art, in the early 1980s, in the footsteps of the Trans-avant-garde, he slowly evolved towards a use of increasingly diverse expressive languages, materials, and objects, with references to Dada and Conceptual Art. His works have been described by Fulvio Abbate as measured, highly cultured, and with a light, calm, and knowing painterly touch. These are works in which the artist, besides the colours and marks, elevates objects (anonymous or otherwise) to extra-artistic entities of great import and to an active and living element of a creative process such as that of a work of art. But then, as Leto himself has stated, an object is an entity that already exists and that must follow a path that ranges from its material quality to its abstraction in the pictorial text that hosts it. This is why we find such materials as plaid, hammers, and grains of sugar as the protagonists of his canvases. […]

Emilia Valenza in “Noli me pingere”, Zelle Arte, Palermo, 2010

[…] “Noli me pingere” – a phrase by the famous interpreter Alfonso Leto – shifts the concept from the religious-social area to that of an artistic-economic one, thus sparking off a process of metamorphosis that he injects into his images; this is the object of his semantic transpositions and his satiation of sense, the responsibility for transmitting messages about the value of contemporary myths in a parodic or at least clinically lucid form. […]

Fulvio Abbate, “Virgo golden” in “Appassionate”, published by ERSU, Palermo 2004

[…] Leto puts gold where, in principle, there was only paper or ink, and in doing so we can imagine him sooner or later making a more serious, chilly, and tragic parody of a post-religious ideal of humanity, in such a place as, for example, Sedona in Arizona. Something that demonstrates the unreality of showbiz society. Where the vulva, as in the James Bon film Goldfinger, is of pure gold. […]

Laboratorio Saccardi interviews Alfonso Leto in “LETO RIDENS opere a piacere” edited by Tiziana Pantaleo, Spazio Cannatella, Palermo, 2012

Saccardi: How to you relate to fashion … above all in art?

Leto: fashions were once the healthy and sublime breeze that wafted the seeds of taste. Today art follows fashions like an old dog that sniffs the scents of a young bitch on heat. They have even managed to make artists feel “guilty” when they do not attune their diapason to fashion. The cultural level of those who buy art today has been lowered considerably and has pulled down all the rest with it. The illiteracy of new collectors is worrying. To think that once they were called “good judges”. […]

Giusi Affronti in “Le gioie semplici”, Neu/Noi –Spazio al lavoro, Palermo, 2011

[…] With the mastery of someone who knows how to make and pick apart the codes of communication, Leto acts astutely on a multiform territory of materials, styles, and languages that range over the main points of art history (from Mannerism to Surrealism), and he ensures that his works have all the freedom of play and invention, that they have his virtuality of persuasion and meaning, and finally, that they have the capacity to bring to their relationship with the viewers a poetic aim that awaits a suggestion, a possibility. […]

Achille Bonito Oliva, in “Figura: una semiotica della grazia nell’opera di Alfonso Leto”, essay for the show “Fabbriche/Leto”, Fabbriche chiaramontane, Agrigento, 2009 (publ. “Di Passaggio”; Palermo)

[…] Now it is possible to hover over, to rush to and court the figure according to the dictates of a curved view that circumnavigates the work, an art aimed at the world and its mass obsessions: fashion, religion, eroticism, technology. To paraphrase Lorenzo il Magnifico, we can conclude “How beautiful is the figure / that, yes, escapes; but / whoever Leto wants to be / his painting is not an imposture!”. […]

Helga Marsala in “Noli me pingere. Un videoritratto di Alfonso Leto”, in Artribune., 20 October 2013

[…] Alfonso Leto is an artist sui generis. As romantic as a protest march, as a spring of water stolen by the scoundrels with power, as someone who teaches in a school the struggle and delight of contemporary art, as a child’s pencil drawing, as a crown of thorns that reveals the dreams and marks of an invincible anarchy. A poetic, polemical, ironic and, in some ways, melancholy spirit, without ever betraying action in the name of contemplation, and vice versa. […]

Valentina Di Miceli in “La Rosalia di Leto, se la Santa è anarchica” from Il Giornale di Sicilia, 17 October 2017

[…] In this way there is revealed to the eye a tangle of marks, lines, thorns, based on tones of blue and red, alluding to veins circulating blood. A complex and desecrating symbolism, typical of the artist’s work, and that unites Christological references to those of anarchy, though emptied of meaning, in an interweaving of “apocryphal Christianity” and aesthetic anarchy.

Giuseppe Alletto, essay for the show “Rovi” by Alfonso Leto, Torre della Fattoria dell’Arte-Teatro Andromeda, S. Stefano Quisquina, 2017

[…] And finally, the main quality of Alfonso Leto’s Rovi series is to be found in its poetic vocation and in the extreme polysemy that impels the viewers to see from time to time in those fake drips the traces of a satellite geography that, by expanding over the pure white surface of an orthogonally projected primordial egg, points to the birth of something new, mysterious, and unexpected.