Artists

Leonardo Devito

Press release

Teatrino is an exhibition project by the Italian artist Leonardo Devito (Florence, 1997) created for his first solo show at the Galleria Ciaccia Levi in Paris.

Paintings and high-reliefs weave a narrative dedicated to the imagery of spectacle, populated by actors and characters, both real and imaginary, who stage performances balanced between a tragic sense of life, alienation, and comedy. Some of these subjects, such as Kafka's trapeze artist and hunger artist— protagonists of the writer's last stories, one realizing himself in isolation on the trapeze and the other in abstaining from food—turn their lives into a work of art, driven by a devotion to art that often remains misunderstood by the public. Other characters seem to belong to a fairy-tale world, catapulted into an ahistorical time. As we enter the exhibition, a sense of familiarity pervades our vision, as if we are recalling a gesture, a gaze, a story from the depths of memory.