Several Art Exhibitions at Moscow Museum of Modern Art (Russia) | Exhibit Architect and Setting Up by Stefania Brugnaletti | Stefania Brugnaletti

2009, 24 June 24 July.  - Art Exhibition "Beyond their Gaze" by Francesca Leone, at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Russia. For the first time in Russia, a personal exhibition of the artist whose paintings have a special place in contemporary Italian art. “Beyond Their Gaze” project presents about 30 large-scale paintings notable for the carefulness of the technique, the concentrated consciousness of chromatic transitions, and the extreme refinement of experiences combined with the force of a visual spell. The exhibition marks the screening of the Sergio Leone movie restored by director Martin Scorsese for the Moscow International Film Festival.

Francesca Leone was born in Rome into a creative and versatile family: her father Sergio Leone was the outstanding film director who collaborated with Robert De Niro, Clint Eastwood, and Ennio Morricone. Francesca’s mother was a famous ballerina, her grandmother was an actress. Since her birth, Francesca was endowed with a deep, spontaneous emotionality that was reflected in her pictorial works.

At the start of her creative career, Francesca Leone studied and reinterpreted the artistic experience of Futurism: Gino Severini, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carra, and Giacomo Balla. Her fascination with Futurism was reflected in the works of the artist – her oeuvre includes energetic compositions where movements of the figures are shown in a dynamic stream of time, where flashing forms, zigzags and oblique lines prevail, where motion is depicted by imposing of consecutive phases in one image (the so-called principle of simultaneity). This artistic principle of “closed dynamics” is reflected in her huge portraits, as if they were piling on the spectator, not holding within the canvas borders.

Despite the obvious narrative and coloristic dramatic nature of her works, Francesca Leone tells the story that is made of thoughts, not of events. The artist has chosen the theme of the picturesque matter formed and transformed in front of the eyes of the spectator. As if the image couldn’t or shouldn’t be provided with a static quality that would have fixed it once and forever. The deep sense of Francesca’s works is concealed in the metamorphoses of the matter symbolizing the conditions of human existence in a labyrinth of a city and an intimacy of a home.

The characters of Francesca Leone’s pictorial works are distinguished by the highest concentration of tension that generates ideas and actions. The theme of the city and loneliness is present in her portraits, heroes, thoughts and actions. Francesca Leone introduces a sensual, emotional measurement in hyperrealism and creates magnificent pictures that can be defined as classical works of the big style – but it is the modern classics, the classics of our time.

2008 September 22, Art Exhibition "Mare Nostrum" by Riccardo Licata, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow. The anthological exhibition was inaugurated, organized by Il Cigno GG Edizioni of Rome and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow, benefits from the collaboration of the Italian Cultural Institute in Moscow, the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Government of Moscow, the Department of Culture of the City of Moscow, the Russian Academy of Fine Arts and aims to be a tribute to the Turin artist who is exhibiting his works for the first time in the Russian capital. The Moscow anthology, curated by Leonardo Conti and Giovanni Granzotto, intends to lead, through this overview, the art of Riccardo Licata back to the Mediterranean matrices along an ideal route that retraces the symbolic places of Western civilization.Licata can probably be considered as a ferryman of art, from the sensibilities of the early Fifties to the present day-, writes Conti. The 49 works exhibited cover a time span that, starting from the informal research of the 50s and 60s, focuses on the series of -Composizioni- and -Polysinfonie- of the 90s and then arrives at the evocative travel pages of the last years. In this excursus we move from the creative season balanced between spatialism and expressionist surrealism, to the more recent and precious "Carte Oro", which present an echo of the Italian Renaissance tradition and in particular of Mannerism.Licata's incessant writing composed of signs, characters, and ideograms, has given life to a sort of aniconic novel, a travel diary, whose pages transmit to the viewer an emotional impact equal to the energy put into the creative act by the artist. In his works, many of the archetypes that are traditionally referred to the Mediterranean civilization chase each other: resonant chromatisms, like musical scores, crossed by expressively abstract graphic signs, almost like primordial graffiti, resonances of civilizations lost in time. From this research, Licata notes, a plastic writing is born, inventive and evolutionary painting of the sign.