Leonardo Devito
A LETTO CON MILLE PENSIERI
30 Aprile – 1 Giugno 2025
To define a classic, Western culture looks to the ancient and traditional. However, classics are not always ancient and traditional. The costume of the Gentlewoman with Rooster by Massimo Stanzione is traditional. Melania Trump's hat at Donald II's inauguration is a classic neither antique nor traditional. Our sense of classicism assesses the difference between the translated and the betrayed. When we talk about a return to classic, it happens to confuse classic with classicism. Classic and tradition are not a determination of time, but a purely spiritual fact. It is impossible to return to the classic, because every era wants its own classic, once it has reached maturity. Melania's hat translates the mature consciousness of capitalist realism into symbol. From this point of view, it is significant that initiation into maturity is the central theme of the cycle of works that Leonardo Devito presents under the title of In bed with a thousand thoughts. On this side of remake and revival, quotation or parody, the aesthetics of capitalist realism must come true in the continuous détournement of the end of history. The school of new contemporary painting processes the mourning of historical reality by renegotiating its relationship with the canon of the classics; a school that likes to recognize itself in an impulse of fraternity, rather than in the avant-garde corpus of manifesto of intent and normalization of style. It has, for example, already been made clear how Louis Fratino is twenty-first-century American cubist who inscribes the "contemporary" contents of identity self- representation into a "traditional" form. Leonardo Devito synthesizes his visual vocabulary from the lesson of the Italian Novecento adventure, in the sense of that precise verisimilitude in atmospheres of lucid amazement, clearly announced by Pisanello's San Giorgio in Verona, as well as, en bloc, by the fifteenth-century triumvirate of Masaccio, Mantegna, and Piero. In front of the book of masters, Devito seeks the adventurous miracle of an everyday, normal life. The profile of the figures, the tonal choice of complexions, the adoption of multifocal perspective, play the pose of ironic detachment in a heterodox mysticism, of magic's dominion over the phenomena of nature. Thus Devito's realist art germinates on a surface that would to all intents and purposes be irreconcilable with pictorial realism. It draws on the essential attribute of the classical, thus on the ability to express itself not only with its own generation in the blood, but with the feeling that all art "has a simultaneous existence and forms a simultaneous order." With respect to an artist who chooses to reveal himself in the rite of passage from adolescence to adulthood, he is therefore interested in the maturity containing individualistic affirmation in the temporal and timeless truth of a tradition. On these notes, the way is cleared for the calm forward flight of new classics.
Ernesto Tedeschi
