The scanner of an intellectual activist
Marco Meneguzzo
Alfonso Leto is a living scanner. An analyst of reality, of everything that ends up within his range of interest (note well: not within his range of action, and not even in his visual range) and that is then developed according to self-generating and self-generated codes. The codes, even more than his languages, have changed fairly rapidly over the years, but the aim is always the same: the codification of reality according to intelligible parameters. In fact, this is the task of intellectuals, and Leto is first and foremost an intellectual, and only then an artist because he has borrowed his codes of reference and communication from art. This originary attitude – that is, the attitude of an intellectual – allows us to analyse in a unitary and coherent way the artist’s path which, instead, is scattered with linguistic changes and revisions that are even extremely different from each other. But art, instead, is the sublime tool of the intellect which, in Leto’s case, comes before any impulse to construct, any instinctive attitude, any compulsion to apply paint to the canvas: despite an apprenticeship typical of an artist – art college, workshop, shows, exhibitions … - Leto is an artist by choice and not by calling. In other words, he belongs to that group of artists who use painting but who could have chosen video, words, performance, or any other medium. Painting is “convenient” because it does not need conceptual justifications, because it does not need to affirm itself as a medium, because it goes straight to the target with a sufficiently sophisticated language to be articulated by and adapted to a complex age such as ours; and it is sufficiently popular and well-known as to be understandable by everyone. In other words, it is a “popular” language, and we all know how much this theme has occupied the mind of Italian intellectuals, from Gramsci onwards (or perhaps even from Pietro Verri and Alessandro Manzoni …): what does “popular” mean? What language can unify the interpretation of things in an acceptable, median, uniform manner? In this sense Leto is a genuine intellectual “activist”, but he is also up-to-date with a kind of Postmodern activism, given that, after all, his mature activity exactly coincided with the success of Postmodernism. In fact, with great lucidity he places limits around the action of the artist and art, in his obeying of the realism of Postmodernism and his opposition to the utopia of Modernity: what art can do is to move individual awareness but not excite the masses, not to teach them universally about the good and the beautiful. In this way, the subjects of art too must not necessarily embody humanity, but instead it is sufficient – and probably more efficacious – to embody the observations of an individual. And so does Leto propose a diary? Certainly not, because he will not give up his function as an intellectual, that is as an interpreter of reality: what strikes him is not only a part of his sensitivity, of his experience, but of the life of all, without for this tapping into the Chief World Systems. In his choice of subjects there is a kind of “shifting”, a “sliding” towards more contingent, though not less general, themes, and this moves his imagination close to daily life. These “imaginary” and “everyday” terms seem opposed; but this is not how it is because Leto manages to be inventive, brilliant, and surprising, even when touching on the banality of news: and he does so through irony, even through puns, witticisms, vulgar phrases, the anonymous invective chalked on walls, even obscene parodies of clichés, of all the clichés that populate our life.Differently from other artists, and even while proceeding with diversified series (though often undertaken at the same time), Leto adapts his language to the subject, he tunes his instrument to the tonality he intends to use.
For this reason, when speaking of his work we cannot first speak of the “thing” and then of the “how”, first of the subject and then of the form given to the subject. We are certainly not dealing with something missing – Modernity taught us to essentially consider the “form of the new” rather than its content … -, but of a confirmation of the initial hypothesis – that he is an intellectual before being an artist – and, at the same time, of his ability to bend language to his thoughts, with a nonchalance that, indeed, denotes the nonchalance with which great artists treat their tools. And so, even if at the heart of everything is a Surrealist way of thinking, and also some Surrealist painting as reviewed by an activist from the Palermo at the end of the 1970s, his imagination has traversed these forty years identifying the themes and problems that have constructed the relationships and thoughts that we are dealing with now. A rather boisterous and noisy joie de vivre, the intrusion of codes that identify each thing in the new IT age, with its videogames similar to Manga cartoons, advertising that is seductive but all the same, and a humanity so glamorous as to be generated in 3D, all meet up with atavist memories, archaic recollections, childish shadows, and cerebral ruins lost in the twists and turns of the brain. Like all good Sicilians, Leto lays claim to his Saint Rosalia, to his other saints, and the stigmata that he cannot free himself of, not even by transforming these symbols of virtue into their opposite, the adversities of virtue, but by doing this he renews its imagery by juxtaposing it to superheroes with large eyes, similar to Japanese cartoons, and by demonstrating its vitality, its possibility of surviving even in the network age: a perfect example of “glocal”, of “global” and “local”, able to exploit with intelligence, cynicism – and a pinch of love – even the most banal folklore.
The form of this Sicilian/global melting pot is varied, and here too Leto shows he has perceived, “sniffed”, that contemporaneity that no longer awards formal coherence but conceptual coherence; and despite the fact that this variety derives from an idea of the “genius loci”, so fashionable in the 1980s, this only goes to show the validity of this hypothesis, one which perhaps constitutes the only contemporary form of resistance to the advance of globalised uniformity. Leto stages this or that in various doses, in different ways and, in any case, under the gigantic idealised umbrella of painting, which is now regaining its areas of adaptability and ductility that it had seemed to have definitively lost. On the contrary, with a fury that seems far greater than that actually employed (when it comes down to it, during his career Leto has painted little more than five hundred paintings, revealing in this way that he thinks about each canvas far more than it might seem …), the artist stages his play by dint of visual superimpositions. At the beginning these were mysterious and particular details, when the Surrealism he was using was more felt, at least from the formal side of things; and then they became speedy, almost cartoon-like marks halfway through the 1980s; and then they cooled down to become abstractions “with many memories”, even “humble” objects – belt bags, wood, ready-mades with a humble yet brilliant heraldry -, and there resurfaced figuration with freehand drawing and then painting flowing with easy colour effects, and painting over advertisement photos to intensify the play of the coming and going of “high” and “low” images, and finally there even appeared flowers! … yes, flowers, the quintessence of genre paintings, except that they were painted on enormous plastic surfaces. Deep down, these are all visual superimpositions. In some cases these are obvious and on the same canvas: two, three, four different images with different qualities and techniques, rather like when on the computer screen there open, one after another – and without us wanting them – a series of windows that seem to “nudge” each other in order to take over the surface and the eye for a moment; in other cases it is necessary instead to think of series, of cycles of works in order to reconstruct a visual “family”, and to place the image inside a larger series of images that, in turn, are part of a potentially infinite whole of possible variants. "It's the imaginary of today, baby! ... "
All of this is Alfonso Leto, who lives in Santo Stefano Quisquina, in the province of Hong Kong.