Paolo Leonardo was born in Turin in 1973, where he still lives and works, the city where he attended artistic high school and the Albertina Academy of Fine Arts. Turin, to him, is an open-air studio of many of his most famous artworks, which have always focused on photography and representation, manipulated through mainly pictorial interventions. His pictorial artwork represents a challenge towards the contemporary media system and a research based on the interaction between painting and photography.
From the very beginning, Paolo has shown interest in imaging, in the infinite reproducibility of a certain type of representation, in particular advertising nature representation. His first interventions involved posters around the city, on which Paolo immediately began a creative confrontation focused on the desire to overturn the meanings of a system, advertising image ones. “I could not tollerate that the urban skyline of my city was invaded by these faces and bodies that represented man, but at the same time they trivialized the subject by stereotyping him and reducing him to merchandise. One night I snached two large posters, one representing a face of a man and one of woman and after having modified them with a pictorial intervention, in an expressionist style, I illegally relocated them in the advertising street displays. “
Since then, his urban interventions have continued for over twenty years not only in Turin but also in Milan, Nice, Brussels, Paris. “The intent of my pictorial interventions was to put representation and the body back at the center by drawing on the immense archive of advertising images that somehow had and have the strength to represent man in contemporary society with his stereotypes, its miseries, with its voids. “
He has been invited to participate to several personal and collective, national and internationals exhibitions, among which Diritto al Futuro (MISP, Museo d’Arte del XX e XXI secolo, San Pietroburgo, 2017); La Torre di Babele (Centro Pecci Prato, ex fabbrica Lucchesi, Prato, 2016); Here, (Cavallerizza Reale,Torino, 2016); Dipingere il Presente (mostra itinerante Peninsula Art Museum,Weihai e Silk Road International Cultural Expo, Dunhuang, Cina, 2016); Atletas e Cores (mostra itinerante nei musei di: San Paolo, Campinas, Rio de Janeiro, Brasilia, Belo Horizonte, Recife, Fortaleza, Natal e Curitiba, Brasile, 2016); Bienal del Fin Del Mundo (Mar Del Plata Argentina, Valparaiso, Cile, 2015); Urban Icons (Castello di Rivara, Torino, 2015); Imago Mundi (Luciano Benetton Collection, Mappa dell’arte nuova, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venezia e Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Torino, 2015); Leonardo,Tealdi,Turzeniecka (art gallery Eric Van Ghendt, Bruxelles, 2014); L’immagine della natività dal medioevo all’arte contemporanea (Palazzo Madama,Torino, 2014); Urban Icons, Wunderkammer Visionnaire (Milano, 2014); Vertigine, Meteorite in Giardino (Fondazione Merz, Torino, 2013); Feminine (Wunderkammer Visionnaire, Milano, 2013); To be continued (Galleria Raffaella De Chirico, Torino, 2013); 25th (galleria Alessandro Bagnai, Firenze, 2012); Utopia (Galerie italienne, Parigi, 2012); Paolo Leonardo (Galleria Alessandro Bagnai, Firenze, 2012); Manifesta, (Andrea Arte Contemporanea, Vicenza, 2011); Gran torino (Patricia and Phillip Frost art Museum, Miami, 2011); Paysages en rouge, (Galerie Placido, Parigi, 2010); (Nouvelles Acquisition, Galerie Placido, Paris, 2010); Marena Room Gallery (Torino, 2009); Superfici Sconnesse (Palazzo Barolo, Torino, 2008); Something Happened (Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava, 2006); Scatole ottiche, (Blu Contemporary Art, Kanal 20, Bruxelles, 2001); Oltre la pittura con Mimmo Rotella (Sala delle Colonne, Mantova, 2000).
