Leonardo Bastiani

In Fabrica Moderna, Lisbon 2023

In Leonardo Bastiani’s paintings we find ourselves suspended between referential vision and subjective interpretation. Looking at them and contemplating them we realize that these compositions generate disorientation when they become recognisable. They capture expectations and reduce his work to a constant search for the indecipherability of the reality that surrounds us. It seems that the artist plays hide and seek with his compositions and it is possible to extricate oneself from this interpretative jungle thanks also to the symbolism that is central and catalyzing in his work, allowing the spectator to wander into the personal history of this artist and to read in the stratification of his our daily life operates. In this context, archetypes take on a fundamental role, being absorbed and rejected, they give life to a new type of representation. In his work we can read his formative years in Florence very well. To effectively read his art we must move between everyday life, art history, religion, intimacy and academic tradition. The densely layered figurative compositions evoke the complexity of contemporary experience, apparently focusing attention on internal facts of his life, his family on images of the world around us. The compositions alternate domestic scenes with symbolic images of our contemporaneity alongside collages of cultural and political symbols, creating a visual metaphor that is stratified, concentrating forcefully like a waterfall in his painting, intertwining personal memory with the cultural history that surrounds us. Ultimately what appears on the canvases is only what “we” are.