Playground II, 2023
Leonardo Pellicanò's artistic practice focuses mainly on painting, a means for the artist to give substance to his reflections and to compose with emotions, while at the same time unfolding a universe open to the imaginary.
As part of Plattform, Pellicanò is presenting a new large-format painting. Playground II refers to an earlier painting from 2018 - the first of a long series created on raw canvas, a surface for which the artist has developed a pictorial technique based on pigments and powders applied to the canvas as if blown or diluted, from which the vaporous forms of his compositions emerge.
In a retrospective gesture, the artist uses a similar colour scheme to the painting he created five years ago, but the figures recognisable in the original painting have become elusive apparitions. Within this dense and malleable composition, any silhouette whose contours seem to be clear is eventually dissolved into a maelstrom of phantasmagorical convolutions. Bursts of bright colour are counterbalanced by darker tones, immersing us in a world that is both mischievous and nightmarish.
Sensitive to the porous and changing nature of our universe, Leonardo Pellicanò's alchemy consists in suspending the movements of metamorphosis in a perpetual becoming.
Colin Raynal (translation P23)
Acrylic, oxidated brass dust, pigment on raw jute
Photo credits: Margot Sparkes