Renato Leotta

io, sono nato qui. (me, I was born here.): the white neon cursive appears on the roof of the Sant’Anna Hospital of Obstetrics and Gynaecology in Turin in a discreet but legible size. Leotta was indeed born at the Sant’Anna Hospital and this makes the work a context-specific and very personal project. But it is also a reminder of the status of the subject more generally, at a time when not only the artist must come to terms with the feeling of his own minority in relation to the gigantic numbers of communications, social media and followers, but also every passer-by, in a car or on foot, can stop at this place along the Po River and experience a poetic moment of awareness of his or her own fragile existence: they too have spent a few hours or days at the time of their birth in an almost anonymous place like this hospital. 

The artwork is therefore a hymn to what remains of the individual and singular person in an algorithmic age of perceived passivity in the face of technology, as well as being an image, in that pause marked by the comma after the word “I”, of the melancholic and hysterical mass narcissism - of those who frantically post their selfies and data in search of feedback and recognition.  

An artist who uses a variety of media and materials, of conceptual and Arte Povera legacy, Leotta was born in 1982 in Turin and lives between Sicily and the city his parents adopted in the 1970s during a tailspin of the industrial boom era. He is among the most emerging young Italian artists also internationally and has exhibited at Manifesta 12 in Palermo in 2018, at the Castello di Rivoli in 2020 and at the 17th Istanbul Biennale in 2022. Recent solo exhibitions include: Castello di Rivoli - Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli (2023). 

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev