Renato Leotta has coerced a subtle yet effective visual poetry out of unusual materials in his short but impressive career, using sand, marble, piles of rocks, terracotta, 16-mm film, fabric and ocean water in his evocative body of work.
At Magazzino, surrounded by the pastoral beauty of the Hudson Valley, Leotta has created Notte di San Lorenzo (New York City), one of his most ambitious projects yet. A site-specific installation featuring hand-fired terracotta tiles arranged within a grassy field, Notte di San Lorenzo (New York City) brings a small piece of Italy to Cold Spring, as it recreates aspects of Leotta’s treasured lemon orchard at his estate in Acireale, a small village in Eastern Sicily. Although much has been written on Leotta’s close “observation” of nature, “communion” is perhaps a more fitting term, as the artist does not simply observe and record as a scientist might, but instead fully immerses himself within the natural world and intuits certain unassailable truths.
The sensation of walking across the handmade terracotta tiles of Renato Leotta’s Notte di San Lorenzo (New York City), which is installed within the bucolic grounds of Magazzino, has the tendency to slacken the effects of time, allowing for a deliciously slow and leisurely experience. The tiles tend to absorb the ambient temperature of the day, soaking up the sun on bright afternoons or keeping their chill in the overcast weather of early spring. Both sensory and contemplative, the work brings about a change in our relationship with the natural world. Gradually, we begin to apprehend that which has been there all along: the twitter and chirrup of birds in the trees or the sound of leaves rustling in the wind. It is this closeness with nature that informs all of Renato Leotta’s work, and we are privileged to experience it, albeit fleetingly, here in Cold Spring.
Renato Leotta was raised in the northern Italian city of Turin, but his family had immigrated from rural Acireale, a small village along the northeastern coast of Sicily by the Ionian Sea. Its rocky shoreline is studded with jet-black sand from nearby Mt. Etna, its terrain hilly and rough. Leotta has recently moved back to Acireale, where he has become attuned to its slow pace and absorbed in the cycles of nature. He has climbed down the rocky shoreline at night to compose his Lunagrammas, made by submerging photographic paper in ocean water and allowing the moonlight to act as a kind of camera obscura.
He has made plaster casts of the wrinkled and furrowed grooves of the sandy beaches of Sicily in the Gipsoteca series, pouring liquid gesso directly on the sand and letting it harden. He has submerged beautiful fabric panels in the sea and allowed the salt crystals to leave their powdery residue in the Multiverso series. Collectively, all of these works retain lingering traces of what the artist calls Avventura. They stem from Leotta’s intimate observation of the sea, connecting him to a rich and storied Sicilian heritage reaching back over countless generations.
Just as the sea evokes the unbounded mysteries of still uncharted worlds, the garden has proven to be a fitting metaphor in Leotta’s work, encompassing feelings of security and a connection to his family’s native land. The Notte di San Lorenzo series epitomizes this concept of the fertile garden, a treasured place where sensory delights are merged with a vigorous yearning for home.
The inspiration for the Notte di San Lorenzo series developed out of Leotta’s walks among the citrus grove located at his estate in Acireale. Wandering through the leafy bower, with the sun-dappled leaves and heady fragrance of ripening lemons, Leotta became interested in the patterns that falling lemons made upon the muddy earth below. Having dropped from the trees, the lemons left small craters in the ground, which accumulated in random spots around the orchard over the course of several days. Leotta brought in clay and laid it down upon the bare earth to recreate the indentation made by each fallen fruit, which he then sliced into square tiles of uniform size and shape. He worked with local craftsmen to learn the ancient art of terracotta tile-making, where the tiles were baked over an open flame rather than fired in a kiln. He then created a small map, on view at Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò New York University, that recorded the placement of each mark, which served as a template when the piece was later unpacked and reassembled at Magazzino.
The first iteration of Notte di San Lorenzo was exhibited at Manifesta 12 in 2018, where it was installed within the ageing Palazzo Butera in Palermo. The second, more recent, incarnation has been commissioned specifically for the pastoral locale of Magazzino here in Cold Spring. Measuring approximately thirty-seven by twenty-two feet, the field of terracotta tiles replicates the exact size of the apartment on the Upper East Side where Leotta stayed during his recent residency. Its rectangular format also mimics the minimalist architecture of Magazzino’s central facade, whilst contrasting to the more organic shape of the winding gravel paths and rolling hills of Cold Spring. Subtle variations in color among the terracotta tiles allow for a pixelated, almost painterly texture to emerge from the piece when viewed from a distance. Up close, as one wanders amidst the terracotta tiles, the tiny craters made from falling lemons mar the surface of the otherwise uniform tiles at seemingly random intervals. It is this contrast, between the precision of man-made geometry (a symbol of the industrial world) and the random character of nature, that continues to underpin Leotta’s best work.
“I always choose the titles of my work very carefully,” Leotta has explained, and much of his work has been named after particular books and films. Notte di San Lorenzo refers to a specific night around August 10th that is commonly known as the “Night of Shooting Stars.” Every year around mid-August, the earth’s orbit crosses through the debris belt of the Swift-Tuttle comet, resulting in the Perseid meteor shower, where it’s possible to witness up to one hundred falling stars within a single hour. First observed around the year 36 AD, the “Notte di San Lorenzo” falls on the feast day of St. Lawrence. Because of this coincidence, the shooting stars that race across the night sky on the feast of San Lorenzo are said to represent the tears spilled by the saint during his painful death. They linger in the heavens only to fall to earth once a year. It is believed that those who observe and remember the saint will see their wishes come true.
During the economic boom of the 1950s and ‘60s, Leotta’s parents, alongside thousands of other Sicilians, immigrated from their home near Acireale to the more industrial city of Turin in Northern Italy. Eventually, Leotta reversed the pattern, moving back to Acireale in order to “slow down time,” as he has said, in a rejection against the postindustrial Italy which previous generations had helped to create.
For Leotta, who feels such a profound connection to the land, moving back to Acireale helped him to escape to another way of life. “Despite the current technological frenzy,” Leotta has said, “we still carry inside us a very ancient world, which resurfaces when we look at the stars in the sky or at the sea... or [when] we contemplate nature.” Considering Renato Leotta’s intimate relationship with the natural world, it is perhaps not surprising that he arrived in Cold Spring along with the new moon and measured his residence here according to the length of a single lunar phase.
Leotta belongs to the generation of Italian artists who never experienced firsthand the political, cultural, and artistic changes that swept through the nation in the 1960s, but who, nonetheless, absorbed their impact. Somewhere between the fast-paced urban environment of Turin—birthplace of Arte Povera and established cultural hub—and the pastoral splendor of Acireale, with its jagged coastline and proximity to Mt. Etna, Leotta found his unique artistic voice. By turning away from the dreams of economic and material success that previous generations had chased, in favor of close communion with the natural world, he succeeded in finding a way forward, creating a body of work that seems utterly fresh and new, although created by an old soul. It is for these very reasons that Notte di San Lorenzo remains such a significant, powerful example of Leotta’s work, for, as the artist reminds us, “Observing a landscape leads to observing yourself.”