On water:
the theorem of
Leone,
diviner of
reflections
Technically,
these pictures were not made by an artist. Giancarlo Leone is an architect
and urban planner
“in the sense of scholar of the city” as he says. His approach
to designing new
built surroundings (a building, a neighborhood, a park, the odd
domestic
interior) is predicated upon the very concept of what the city is. Usually,
architects
understand the city to be a place of encounter and social interaction, the
opportunity to
experiment with new modes of habitation and buildable utopias – or
at least attempts
to build utopias – and this is what architects have been thinking
about cities for
a long time, maybe too long.
The particularity
of these photographs, the irrefutable illustrational allure of
a liquid universe
to which Leone seems to have discovered the secret entryway,
lies precisely in
their origin as a variation on this design-driven theme. Instead
of thinking of
the city as a designable, concrete entity made of bricks and mortar,
concrete and
glass, mind-bending regulations and Kafkaesque procedures, an entity
that sees the
architect either at a work desk, on a construction site or in the
office of an
attorney friend, Leone seems to have decided one fine day to leave these
assigned places,
to go out and have a good look at the city and its spaces, to simply
acknowledge their
existence.
To see beyond the
kind of well-trained architectural gaze that is overly focused
on spotting in
the built environment gaps suited to possible projects; errors committed;
corrections that
could be made; or simply imagining other hypothetical universes
constructed on
flights of fancy, Leone equips himself with the most readily
available tool,
the camera, for its ability to read shape and light. He proceeds by leaving
it almost free to
reproduce what happens in and around the surface of Milan’s
water, above all
the Navigli canals.
Of course it is
Leone who decides what and when to frame and shoot, but he
is ready for the
risks. Once he has pinpointed a certain composition of substantial
aesthetic and
emotive interest (the two aspects are supposed to overlap), the image
just might transform
itself under his very eyes in an unexpected way, with the
same randomness
that generated it in the first place. What initially had seemed the
reflection of a
20th-century rationalist or eclectic artistic idea takes on the calming
semblance of
impressionism, or the less peaceful contours of abstract expressionism,
or the even less
reassuring silhouette of the Ars Electronica Center, perhaps
merely for a duck
passing by with her ducklings or a gust of wind or a cloud that is
more luminous or
darker than the others.
Nature is known
to already contain every possible form of imagery found in
very ancient or
very contemporary art. Our attempts to reproduce its gigantic
greatness are
just the hope to leave a trace of some insignificant type compared to
the eternity of
nature itself. Very few have had the courage to anachronistically rise
to the challenge
of this vexatissima quaestio (as for architects, Paolo Portoghesi is
one). Maybe our
ongoing climate catastrophe will induce us to rethink the question,
especially
regarding the liquid element par excellence that Leone has chosen as the
palette for his
pictures.
Here we arrive at
the demonstration of the theorem of Leone, which is entirely,
clearly
empirical. If everything written here is just a tiny bit true; if without
expedients
and trickery the
creator of these photographs has succeeded in venturing
into the
territory of pure imagery, unfunctional or with only an aesthetic function,
to produce his
very own encyclopedia of water; if even a city as delusive and self-delusional
as Milan thereby
acquires a happily oneiric dimension, then Giancarlo
Leone must
receive an honorary listing in the Order of Artists for special merit,
namely his talent
as a diviner of reflections.
stafano casciani June 17, 2022, Milan, 32 degrees Celsius
