Friday 20 March at 18.00 in the halls of the terraces of Castel dell'Ovo in Naples, with the patronage of the Commune of Naples, there will be the opening of the Francesca Leone exhibition "Primo Piano" organized by Gianpaolo Brun and with catalogue texts by Claudio Strinati, Lorenzo Canova.
The one-woman exhibition, already presented in December 2008 at Palazzo Venezia in Rome, will be exhibited, after the city of Naples, at Museum of Modern Art of Moscow, to came back in autumn in Rome at Valentina Moncada Gallery.
The exposition of twenty art works of big and various sizes, also enriched with some paintings exhibited in Palermo at the Loggiato di San Bartolomeo, shows us, in the principal section, a number of extremely important personages that have marked the history of 20th century, but at same time demonstrate us the great artistic talent of Francesca Leone which is in the choice of the personages that are "caught" and not depicted.
Francesca, even though using a clear and fresh brush stroke, apparently informal and random, has the great ability to penetrate the psychological characters, introspective and essentially real, of Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, A. San Suu K. and of her father Sergio Leone. It's just this Francesca's ability a result of the same DNA of Sergio who, to the image's slovenliness of a part of the contemporary cinema, he used to prefer to reach the psychology of the characters through very long shots and slow camera movements, an almost maniacal search of details. In the Francesca's close-ups, that look concealed by an expressionist brush stroke, there's the sign of the inwardly lived time; through the blob, the dripping, the artist catches the inner elements that determines the protagonists' soul of her works and acquaints us with this thorough analysis, not using an outdated portrait painting and not rendering a confused image.
Her message has a power and an intensity legible in the spiritual power, indelible and lived, of the personage that emerges from the somatic types.
Claudio Strinati, curator of the exhibition at Palazzo Venezia, says about her: "The artist has led to a level of maturity her first experience close, at least for a certain period, to the hyper-realistic tensions of the end of the past century. She has benefited from the teachings but she has never wanted to espouse a preconceived doctrine. On the contrary she has put in this type of idea a passionate and deeply emotional dimension that have kept her away from the speculative lucubrations that have often accompanied many forms of the return to the depiction".
Press preview Friday 20 March at 18.00
The exhibition will be open to the public from Saturday 21 March 9.00-18.00