On the occasion of the eighteenth edition of the Contemporary Day, Saturday 8 October 2022, Galleria La Nuvola will exhibit, in its new space located in Via Margutta 41, the work Pangea (2009) by Emilio Leofreddi (Rome, 1958). The event, promoted by AMACI (Association of Contemporary Art Museums), will be held throughout the country, involving galleries and museums, foundations and artists, and will have ecology and sustainability as its central theme, both much discussed topics , but never enough.
For this reason, the La Nuvola Gallery has chosen to participate in this awareness day by choosing an artist like Leofreddi, previously presented also at the Vittoriano Museum. If on the one hand he has been defined as a traveling artist, with his stays in India, the starting point for his series of works which he called Dreams, on the other hand he represents for the spectator an awakening from that “paralysis of wakefulness” which l man lives every day.
His works represent, in fact, points of stasis, stations of concreteness to dispose the thought to the idea before action, to try to reflect on the surrounding space before acting in a rash and unaware way on a world that cannot be knows, not because it is mysterious and hostile, but because it is increasingly the setting for a life that is considered independent of it. In the works conceived and then created by Leofreddi, in his maps as in some papers, the notice “You are here” stands out, used very often to prevent the individual/mass from getting lost in crowded places such as parks, subways, hypermarkets and museums . The story The Man of the Crowd, published by Edgar Allan Poe in 1840, comes to mind, where an anonymous protagonist in a depersonalized and moving metropolis chooses to shun his thoughts to appease an anguish that gradually seems to become pathological, ending up with ‘to become anesthetized within that human torrent glimpsed, at the beginning of the story, through the glass window of a room.
Matteo Giuseppone