"At the base there are images that have a particular meaning for me, they come from my personal experience or from distant stories that I feel involved in. When I focus on an image, meanings, analogies, contrasts and complementary elements start to emerge that I decide to discard or to keep until everything becomes perfectly clear. I prefer to start from an image of the present to bring it to its origin, invent the stories that constitute my current reality, give life to figures that embody sensations and particular meanings. The process is never the same, sometimes it also happens to come across remote images, of times never lived and never seen with which I accidentally find a connection. Not everything happens exclusively in the mind, once I start, painting becomes the protagonist. Colour guides the mental image, dilates it, transforms it and depletes it, even to the point of completely overturning its meaning. Surely it is always the painting in relation to the image to have the last word, to pull the strings of the speech."
– Courtesy of the Artist
Leonardo Devito (B. Florence 1997) lives and works in Turin, Italy. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts of Florence (BFA, 2020) and studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste of Vienna. He is currently pursuing an MFA in painiting at the Albertina Acadmey of Fine Arts of Turin. His background is deeply connected to urban art, of which he practiced over the years under the pseudonym 'Mehstre'.
