‘Sifted Sands and Caverns Hoar:’ The Work of Renato Leotta

The natural phenomena to which Renato Leotta is drawn—the moon, the ocean, stars, tides, plants—form the most prevalent components of Romantic poetry, regularly deployed to metaphorical, allegorical, and “objective correlative” effects. Such phenomena concentrate and illustrate the unrelenting contingency of the world in which humankind finds itself: volatility, immeasurability, equivocation, mystery. Consider one of the genre’s archetypes, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Epipsychidion (1821):

With ever-changing sound and light and foam,  

Kissing the sifted sands, and caverns hoar;  

And all the winds wandering along the shore  

Undulate with the undulating tide…(1)

Animating a range of earthly forces and substances (sound, foam, light, sand, wind, tide) are consummately transitory verbs: to sift, to wander, to undulate, to ever-change. Nature, in short, forms the origin and exemplar of Romantic transmutation. By virtue of what the author and art historian John Ruskin called the “pathetic fallacy,” the natural world—sun, moon, clouds, trees, storms, etc.—comes to reflect wholly human actions and emotions as if in a vast, transcendental mirror (“The moonlight of the expired night asleep,” in Shelley’s anthropomorphizing verse).(2) To take an example closer to Leotta’s origins in Italy, Giacomo Leopardi’s poem “L’infinito” (1819) epitomizes the Romantic affinity for the unknown and unknowable, its “endless spaces” and “infinite silence.” That which cannot be seen—whether through occultation or boundlessness—proves more consequential to the human soul than the observable world. 

Renato Leotta regularly brings into the gallery space samples of that natural infinity: grains of sand, clumps of dirt, particles of dust, crystals of salt, fragments of shell. These appear, however, bounded and circumscribed, sliced and sectioned. Leotta’s works reveal visible borders. They are hemmed in by geometric regularity, even gridded symmetry. Whether as casts, containers, or segments of cut cloth, these pieces tame nature into a state of semi-permanence. Cleansed of any anthropomorphic redolence—or of Romanticism more broadly conceived—the artist’s objects and installations 19 nevertheless evince strikingly lyrical notes. We find in the range of Leotta’s work a deft negotiation between brute matter and a poetics of form.

As much as it recalls Arte Povera’s emphasis upon process, chance, and the poetics of materials, Leotta’s practice resonates with experiments by more contemporary artists such as Olafur Eliasson. Made in collaboration with his sailor-artist father, the latter’s The wave moving on the sea between Greenland and Iceland, 1999, made use of various colored pens suspended from a ship’s ceiling, which recorded on paper the capricious movements of the vessel at sea.(3) The works are thus oceanographic in the literal sense: they transcribe the flux of currents and waves into webs of colored lines, at once concrete and immaterial, scribbled records of fleeting swells. Relevant to Leotta’s practice is the final work’s contiguity to the natural world—determined by its physical, gravitational, and kinetic forces, yet marked by these only obliquely, partially. For, Leotta routinely hones in on the intangible space between nature’s physical manifestation and the indirectness of its re-presentation. If his works bear the actual imprint of natural forces and substances, they also make use of semantic and spatial (and even institutional) displacements which prompt a reconsideration of these phenomena. 

Consider, for example, his casts of segments of various shorelines. Made on site at different beaches—beginning with the coast of Leotta’s native Sicily—the Gipsoteca casts fix a single instant: the moment after a wave has receded from a section of beach, leaving in its wake ridges, rivulets, and furrows. Once he has staked out a square section of sand by means of wooden slats, Leotta pours liquescent gesso directly onto the sand. When the impression finally hardens and is removed, its surface retains various natural substances, whether sand, stones, small shells. Thus, while representing a proverbial, physical “negative” of the section of beach, each cast bears with it the “original” material dimensions of the same site. The Gipsoteca works thus form a hybrid of simulacrum and sample. The artist has described the works as “a kind of sculptural archive.” In their format and presentation—side by side on raised display tables—the casts indeed evoke paleological specimens exhibited in some natural history museum. Their irregular sizes and the gaps between each respective piece, however, underscore their necessarily fragmentary and arbitrary status. Titled TWO HANDS (2019), the most recent iteration of this series derives from beaches on opposite sides of the Atlantic, in Portugal and New York respectively, the resulting casts of which are exhibited on separate plinths. A preparatory drawing for the piece reveals the artist seated at a long, curved piano, its top colored in blue and labeled “oceano.” The artist’s two hands reach out to the left and right, playing the keys on this stylized piano, bringing together its two distant shores. The installation’s empirical appearance thus belies a certain lyrical impetus. 

Leotta has adapted aspects of the Gipsoteca series to a different series called TWO HANDS. In these sculptural works, each named for a major port city, a slice of shoreline is first cast in plaster before being wrought in terracotta. The slab is used as the makeshift cover to a clay, box- or amphora-shaped container of the same material, bearing a single hole. Here the artist invokes the further sense of sound, as the vessel’s round aperture—when the ear is pressed close—produces the acoustic illusion of a windswept shore, not unlike a conch shell. Such an allusion underscores the affective—perhaps even nostalgic—undercurrent of the Gipsoteca works, their evocation of beach sand or shells gathered by a child (or an adult) for memory’s sake. Rather than something contained, however, the shore—or a replica of it—serves as the container for something intangible. 

A more recent installation presented by Leotta at Manifesta at the Palazzo Butera in Palermo also uses clay as its medium. Taking its title from a mid-August day when shooting stars are most visible in some parts of Italy, Notte di San Lorenzo in fact captures the traces of different falling objects. Over approximately 150 square meters of the ground of his own personal citrus grove, the artist laid down a layer of fresh clay, which received the imprints of lemons fallen to earth over the course of several days. Leotta subsequently cut the clay into square tiles, fired them, and installed them—piece by piece—on the floor of the Palazzo Butera, in a reconstruction of their original orientation in the lemon grove (aided by both a preparatory study as well as inscriptions on the back of each tile). In its reinstallation inside the palazzo, the work necessarily omits various gaps and irregularities on the orchard ground (whether its respective tree trunks or other organic material).

Rather than site-specific, Notte di San Lorenzo is site-itinerant. If its physical dimensions are anchored in one place, it is the work’s subsequent transfer to a very different locale—that of the gallery—which most poignantly motivates its meanings. The grounds of Magazzino Italian Art host the latest extension of that itinerancy. Measuring approximately thirty-seven by twenty-two feet, this iteration of Notte di San Lorenzo, transports the traces from the artist’s citrus grove to the no less bucolic setting of an upstate field. Effecting a kind of conceptual and spatial simultaneity, the gridded regularity of the work both contrasts with its wild surroundings and echoes the geometry of Magazzino’s central edifice nearby.

As in so many of the artist’s works, meaning is suspended between contingency and concept. Across the expanse of clay tiles we find large and small indentations marking the fallen fruit, long since rotted and disappeared. Even in its spare simplicity the work records the actual effects of multiple phenomena, such as wind, weight, and gravity, as well as their inexorable confluence at a specific time and place. An accompanying 16 mm film reveals lemons shown in close-up, brought increasingly nearer to the camera. They gradually become blurred, in some cases filling the entire screen with a yellow haze. The pieces of fruit appear as abstract impressions of color rather than recognizable objects, further inflecting the installation’s ethereal allusions. In light of its title, Notte di San Lorenzo spurs us to think of these phantom lemons as stars of a sort; a (literally) mundane occurrence thus takes on the marvel of an interstellar apparition, leaving spectral traces upon the earth. “As long as you still experience the stars as something ‘above you,’” writes Friedrich Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil, “you lack the eye of knowledge.”(4) Incited by his self-appointed apprenticeship to Nietzsche, the Italian Metaphysical painter Giorgio de Chirico duly reflected in his various writings on the notion of “the sky turned upside down,” as well as “magic fallen to earth” and a “new astronomy of things.”(5) The willful dislodgment of Notte di San Lorenzo from the domestic realm to a public one, and from an infinite space to a circumscribed room, evinces something of de Chirico’s enigmatic displacements. For his part, Leotta has remarked that the work conjures up the rapport between “palace” and “vassal.” That political inflection remains only implicit, however, a dialectic as congealed and hardened as the work’s clay tiles.

Even still, Leotta’s installation not only evokes chance, but registers it physically. In this regard, Notte di San Lorenzo shares as much with strains of Dada and its neo-avant-garde inheritors as with the patrician poetics of Metaphysical imagery. If the installation’s regular clay slabs recall the minimalist sculptures of Carl Andre, the characteristically indexical impetus of Leotta’s work relates to a strain of aesthetics beginning in the 1970s, memorably identified by the critic and art historian Rosalind Krauss. The implication is that there is no convention for meaning independent of or apart from that presence… [T]he indexical presence…demands that the work be viewed as a deliberate short-circuiting of issues of style. Countermanding the artist’s possible formal intervention in creating the work is the overwhelming physical presence of the original object, fixed in this trace of the cast.(6)

That Leotta speaks of his sand casts as “negatives” of their original sites comes as little surprise. The prominence of casting in his oeuvre confirms the fundamentally indexical thrust of his practice, as does his insistence upon a poetics of presence. He has explored this tendency not merely with sculptural casts, but also a series of philo-photographic works.

Though not photographs per se, Leotta’s Multiverso works evoke photographic process both metaphorically and materially, to the extent that their dipping in seawater recalls the various salt solutions employed in photographic developer baths. Bisected at the middle into two differently-hued quadrants—with a dark shade of blue topping a light, powdery hue below—the Multiverso cloths recall the large abstract paintings of Mark Rothko. For all their dogged non-objectivity and vertical orientation, Rothko’s canvases themselves routinely evoke landscapes and seascapes, particularly of the Romantic tradition. Some of Rothko’s early works, like Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea, depict an actual shoreline, which would later find only indirect allusion in his mature abstraction. Leotta’s blue cloths similarly evoke the horizon line of ocean panoramas, with a faint splatter of white salt along their middle edge even suggesting— as if specked and stippled with brushstrokes—the wispy spray of waves against the skyline. Yet Leotta’s Multiverso works not only conjure up seascapes in representational form; they also constitute literal records of the sea itself.

The horizon line marked at their center forms the empirical trace of seawater as it meets the sky. The works thus form a tautology of sorts: at once pictorial and literal, physical and conceptual. 

For all their apparent simplicity, the works are not without historical and political significance. However unwittingly, the cotton fiber of the Multiverso drapes suggests the sailcloth of merchant ships from Venice and Genoa. By the fifteenth century in Italy, la cotonina (cloth canvas) formed a major item of export from Genoa to the rest of the Mediterranean.(7) In a less tangible sense, the cloths also conjure up the iconographic tradition of the Veil of Veronica and its deeply spiritual redolence. The salt crystals preserved in the works’ lower halves recall the saline effigy of the Volto Santo: Christ’s visage miraculously imprinted when Saint Veronica wiped the blood and sweat from his face as he mounted the Via Dolorosa. As an archetypal acheiropoieton (from the Greek ἀχειροποίητα, “made without hands”), the Veil of Veronica evokes its iconic subject indexically, without aesthetic intervention on any artist’s behalf.(8) Of course, any sacral presence evoked by Leotta’s Multiverso series is aniconic and disembodied. Their traces effect a direct connection to the sea itself, and hence to nature as a site of physical marvel. Perhaps more than any mystical allusion, however, present historical and geopolitical context casts the works in light of the Mediterranean’s recent migration tragedies. The sea off Sicily’s southern coast has become a mass, anonymous graveyard of individuals seeking a better life on new shores. 

Leotta has also turned to the sea in creating a series of so-called Lunagrammas, made by submerging photographic paper directly in seawater at night. Covered when submerged, then exposed for a short period, the prints are developed almost immediately after. The relative fullness of the moon—whether waxing or waning—determines the level of exposure, turning the natural world into a kind of camera obscura, or shutter, at large. Rather than photographs, the resulting silver gelatin prints are photograms of a sort—a camera-less medium with a distinguished history among twentieth-century avant-garde artists. The images capture moonlight as filtered through water, resulting in arresting formal compositions of rippling luminescence, in which traces of light appear inextricable from the watery medium through which they are filtered. 

Just as seawater tends to accelerate the hardening of gesso used in his sand casts, it likewise accelerates the development process, adding a further layer of contingency to the images’ forms. Though seemingly abstract, the prints are in fact bound indexically to an objective origin, both liquid and luminous. We might recall The Pencil of Nature (1844-46), the first photographically illustrated book, authored by the English inventor and photographer, Henry Fox Talbot. A notice in the volume announces to readers that its contents are “impressed by the agency of Light alone, without any aid whatsoever from the artist’s pencil.” Distinguishing his images from “engravings in imitation,” Talbot called his own works “sun-pictures,” insisting upon the indexicality of their origin. To the proverbial pencil of natural light, Leotta’s moon-pictures add the evanescent swirl of water. In series after series, work after work, Leotta marries the precision of recording and registering to strikingly ephemeral and phenomenological effects, in a practice remarkably suspended between materiality and marvel.