Interview
Meet Leonardo Devito
In April, Salemi Ceramics welcomed Florentine painter Leonardo Devito for a residency in which he will focus on the medium of clay, carrying his artistic investigations from canvas into three-dimensional form.
Although Leonardo works mainly in painting, ceramics has long felt like a natural counterpart. He first picked up clay in art high school, where a teacher sparked his passion, and kept taking sculpture courses throughout his time at the Academy of Fine Arts, outside his main program.
"Sculpture is tactile and exists in space, while painting remains illusory," he explains. "Modeling feels intuitive, almost elemental, simpler and often more enjoyable than painting for me."
Daily life, the supernatural, and the absurd
"What generally inspires me is a blend of art history and my everyday life," Devito says. "I enjoy creating images that combine historical iconography with scenes from my own experiences or emotions I have truly felt."
Leonardo's paintings and bas-reliefs combine recognizable classical references with whimsical details and subtly eerie atmospheres. Historical motifs coexist with personal imagery, dreamlike symbols, and occasional absurd elements, in a visual language that evokes Surrealism while remaining distinctly personal and contemporary. The supernatural also plays a role in his imagery:
"I'm interested in using supernatural elements to tell a story from my personal experience. It's a way to give concrete form to feelings that couldn't otherwise be represented."
In Minacciacavallo (2023), a Renaissance-inspired bas-relief drawn from Donatello's horses and classical hero portraits, a knight presses a knife to his horse's throat.
In Senza Titolo ("untitled"), a domestic scene of a mother with her children is interrupted by a disproportionately small smoking rastafarian figure.
"It's a disturbing presence both for the scene and the painting itself," he says. "Intentionally ugly, just an experiment."
Ex votos
In Salemi, Leonardo has already started working on bas-reliefs exploring the imagery of painted ex-votos – small devotional works in which ordinary life suddenly opens up to a supernatural dimension.
"What interests me is the blending of the sacred and the everyday. It's that narrative tension in which a simple or dramatic moment of ordinary life suddenly opens up to a supernatural dimension, capable of changing its course or revealing a deeper meaning," he explains.
He's developing a series of paintings and ceramic bas-reliefs which are not necessarily religious, but capable of evoking "a sense of miracle, enigma, or revelation."
"The ex-voto becomes for me not only a devotional object, but also a powerful narrative and visual device," he says.
The sacred and the uncanny
For his ceramics works, Leonardo doesn't do any preliminary sketches. He works spontaneously, starting from one image and then adding other elements instinctively, as they emerge.
In one piece, still unfinished and untitled, he began with the image of a man staring at himself in the mirror. He then added, almost unconsciously, a punk mohawk. In a kind of accidental alignment, the hairstyle takes on the appearance of a halo, recalling sacred imagery. All the elements are there: the mundane intimacy of a moment in front of a bathroom mirror, the unsettling detail that disrupts it, and the ambiguity between a contemporary figure and a vaguely sacred presence. The result is a work that does not seek clarity, but stays with uncertainty: where the familiar turns subtly strange, and meaning remains unresolved.