Luca Leandri’s artistic path runs, with rare consistency, through the difficult (and often critically neglected) terrain of contemporary sculpture. From his first works of the 1980s, which revealed a technical mastery and a sensibility uncommon in a young artist, to his recent pieces, Leandri shows how one can remain nobly faithful to a traditional material such as clay while still practising a contemporary idiom. I shall not dwell on the technical specifics of terracotta sculpture, from raku to bucchero, in which Leandri is a master and which he handles with absolute command, but rather on the happy outcome of the encounter between those techniques and the artist’s creativity: his sculptures are born in the silence of the studio, far from the noise of the world yet alert to reading and interpreting its contradictory signs, its dramatic tensions, its driftings, its hidden beauty. The works arise from inner necessity, from the search for the transcendent, from a condition of the spirit, from a vision, from a dream. They are not mercantile calculation, a chasing after the fashion of the moment, drawing-room ornaments, decorative upholstery: art, as Mario Sironi wrote, is “the theatre of a drama”.

Leandri models compact, rigorous, distilled forms: few concessions to colour, for the firing lends the works the archaic mystery of black and of ranges of grey. No decorativism, the artist forgoes easy virtuosity, seeking out the decisive volumes, the dialogue between solids and voids: in this way the sculpture attains a powerful essentiality, a severe balance between form and lyrical content… the works speak of inescapable ties to the Etruscan land (the bucchero pieces of “Radici” [Roots]), of literary affinities (“Il giardino di Ovidio” [Ovid’s Garden]), of reflections on the fragility of the human condition (“Corpi giustapposti” [Juxtaposed Bodies]).

The long-standing friendship that binds me to the artist allows me to bear witness to the intellectual tension and the deep sensibility that lie at the origin of Leandri’s poetics: every work documents a careful labour of research and analysis into art, understood as an existential journey charged with wonder, with study, with experimentation. His formal vocabulary is firmly rooted in the sculptural tradition of the Italian twentieth century, which the sculptor shows he knows thoroughly: the “Cavalli gotici” [Gothic Horses] series, born of a reflection on the human condition, forever oscillating between life and death, evokes metaphysical overtones, as does “Uomo in allarme” [Man on Alert]. The dominant theme of Leandri’s work, beyond its various stylistic inflections, remains in every case the inquiry into and reflection upon humanity, with its contradictions, its impulses, its defeats. The powerful anatomical construction of “Stele” thus becomes a metaphor for incommunicability: the empty space between the two elements is part of the sculpture and defines its meaning. In other works one senses the presence of the sacred, as in “Corpi” [Bodies], whose tight sequence of panels recalls ex-votos recounting ordinary lives, unknown yet mysteriously present in their barely sketched forms, or as in the concise stylisations of the “Madri Teste” [Mother Heads].

Leandri’s sculptures ultimately mark the unfolding of an artistic vocation lived with absolute fidelity and purity of spirit, at times with sacrifice and toil. “Making” art can be easy; being an artist rather less so. Luca Leandri is an artist.

Luca Leandri (Deruta, 1964) lives and works in Umbria, Italy. Counted today among the leading figures of contemporary and experimental ceramics in Italy, he took up sculpture at a very young age, creating forms and experimenting with materials. It is precisely this identity as a maker and researcher in the field of plastic materials that shapes his commitment to the study of new technical solutions. In the early 1980s he took part, with Mario Mirabassi, in setting up a centre for the visual arts, “Materiale e Immagine 2”, in Perugia. From 1987 to 1993 he was involved in the activities of the “Opera” Cultural Association of Perugia, directed by Bruno Corà. From 1995 to 2003, with the assistance of Elisabetta Corrao, he ran a gallery in the historic centre of Perugia where, besides exhibiting his own work, he hosted other artists taking part in themed contemporary-art events. Since 2019 his works have been on permanent display in his own gallery in Todi, in Via Duomo, where he receives visitors by appointment.

Since 2002 he has lived and worked in his home-studio in the countryside at Marsciano (Perugia), devoting himself entirely to his artistic research and production. Through the year Luca Leandri gives part of his time to the teaching of art and ceramic sculpture, through courses at various levels, often conducted, too, in an experimental spirit and with care to kindle the interest and sensibility of his pupils. Part of his teaching work is devoted to fostering the creative activity of people with disabilities.