Leonardo Devito: Tired City

“I didn’t look at contemporary art when I was studying at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence,” Devito tells me from his Turin studio, as he prepares himself for a trip to the Venice Biennale the next day. “I looked at what was around me. Artists working at the beginning of the Quattrocento like Fra Angelico and Piero della Francesca helped form my thinking. They have become ever present in my work, almost part of my subconscious.” In Rogo [Fire] (2024), one of Devito’s paintings on view in Tired City, his second solo exhibition at The Artist Room, a man is splayed on the ground, sleeping while appearing to ignore the burning city behind him. Devito’s use of strong shadows and harsh corners echoes the convergent perspectives used by artists from the Renaissance like Giotto to render the perspective of the city. “I don’t do this on purpose,” he observes. “Sometimes, I only realise after I finish a painting that what I was making recalls a certain image that I may have seen in the past, a hidden memory from earlier in life.” The man in Rogo [Fire] is wrapped in a blue sheet, with a soft, darker fabric covering his eyes. After finishing, Devito noticed a connection with Giovanni Bellini’s Drunkenness of Noah (1515) . Differently, I couldn’t help but connect the detailed folds of Devito’s blue fabric with the sculpted marble drapes that wrap the statue of St. Cecilia (1600) by Stefano Maderno in Rome, or the marbled veil covering Giuseppe Sanmartino’s Veiled Christ (1753) in Naples. “It becomes natural for me to get closer to that type of image, one that faintly recalls elements of the Renaissance, the Baroque, or of Italian art history in general. I guess it’s ingrained in me,” Devito adds.

“I’m very interested in how artists from the 20th century have reinterpreted the Renaissance, like Felice Casorati, Giorgio de Chirico, and Mario Sironi,” Devito says. “In my practice, I seek a similarly malleable way of creating imaginary worlds that subtly hint at the artistic and architectural landscapes of the past.” While Devito may be reminiscing on the romantic Florentine Renaissance and looking at Italian artists from a more recent past, the paintings featured in Tired City also thread directly into the present through their relation with his own personal experiences. The journey of his exhibition begins with the painting Demiurgo [Demiurge] (2024) which depicts a child holding a leafless tree enclosed within a circular box. “In elementary school, I remember spending lunch breaks with my friends building houses where little gnomes would live,” Devito recollects. “We’d find sticks, put them on the ground, make some holes, and play together pretending that these little gnomes did this and that.” With the tree close to his heart, the boy in Demiurgo [Demiurge] is wrapped in the little world he holds, disregarding the infinite horizon in the background with its mountains, ocean, and rising sun. When asked if the gnomes were actual toys, Devito laughs and says, “No, we’d pretend they existed. It was a moment of shared fantasy creating an imaginary city.” The title of the painting, Demiurgo [Demiurge], stems from the philosophical figure of the ‘demiurge’, the divine artisan and shaper of the universe, first introduced by Plato in Timaeus. Just like the boy in the painting is the demiurge of the little world he holds on to, Devito is the demiurge of the imaginary cities populated by gnomes he and his friends would create at school, and today, of the world he constructs in his practice. Painting by painting, Devito takes us on a journey through a semi-imaginary world, materialising it through the perspective of a child growing up.

In Primo Giardino [First Garden], more trees seem to have grown in the enclosed city and are no longer without leaves; yet, they are all translucent and protected by three similarly sheer and small beings standing at the bottom of the frame. “I added those little characters to make the painting less solemn – more playful and whimsical,” Devito explains. “They’re kind of like the little toys you’d find in Kinder Surprise Eggs.” The existence of the three mystical Kinder beings is subtle, because they are shadowed by the imposing cement-like grey walls enclosing the world of trees. Yet, playful references to his childhood experience don’t end here. In Tardo Pomeriggio [Late Afternoon] (2024), two teenagers are pictured sitting on a bench, one holding a deck of cards, the other is wearing a sweatshirt emblazoned with a faded drawing of a urinating child. Upon closer inspection, the brown spiral on the reverse of the cards recalls Yu-Gi-Oh! Trading Cards and the urinating kid recalls the unlicensed Calvin peeing drawing popularly plastered across T-shirts and on cars in the noughties. Devito hints at the specific yet shared playful experience of growing up in the early 2000’s through these details. He brings them in stark contrast with the river that dramatically curves into the horizon with the factory standing behind the adolescents. “It’s similar to the factories near my house in the peripheries of Florence,” Devito says. The clash between the factory’s smoke and playful childhood ephemera heightens the nonchalant expressions of the boys as they sit staring blankly at whatever stands in front of them, beyond the frame.

A discomforting sensation seems to loom over Devito’s paintings through the expressions of his protagonists that collide with what’s happening around them. “I don’t like when an image is clearly joyful or clearly sad,” he adds. “There has to be a clash between emotions. When that happens, there’s an ambiguity that leaves room for something more interesting to be revealed.” This is evidenced in paintings like Ricreazione [Recreation] (2024), where darkness takes over children while playing what’s meant to be a fun game during their lunch break. Devito’s imagined city becomes an alternate universe where worlds seem to collide.

“It’s interesting when things from the past find themselves in places that have nothing to do with them, like Derek Jarman’s film Caravaggio (1986),” Devito explains. In the film, Jarman envisions a fictional narrative of the painter’s life including scenes of Caravaggio smoking cigarettes among other contemporary elements that couldn’t have existed during his lifetime. Yet, these inclusions are subtle, brief, and don’t feel out of place. “I’m intrigued by this type of collision,” Devito tells me. In Assedio [Siege] (2024), he paints little soldiers shooting rifles to defend a mediaeval castle. The soldiers should feel intrusive and yet, they don’t – they seamlessly integrate with the dramatic scene where a young boy wearing contemporary clothing is about to crash a ship into the castle that they are protecting. The temporal eras from which the soldiers, castle, and boy originate no longer matter in Devito’s surreal whimsical world. Like a frozen snapshot, the focus shifts to impending action.

Drawing the title of his exhibition from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1972), Devito blends the real with the fantastical, proposing an alternate world where growing up may not necessarily mean living in a more cynical environment. Similarly to how Calvino takes the real historical figure of Marco Polo to imagine cities in Kublai Khan’s empire, Devito bridges how Italian history has been conceived in our collective memories with his contemporary personal experience to construct the Tired City.

Since moving to Turin in 2020, where he is now surrounded by contemporary art, Devito’s Tired City becomes a project of looking back, a coming together of collective memories, fictional fantasies, and lived, personal experience. “All of life seems to be rich and full of possibilities when you’re a child, all beautiful, joyful, and infinite,” Devito says. “Then you grow up and all that fantasy seems to catch on fire and disappear.” The journey across the Tired City ends with Bobi fa pipì [Bobi Pee] (2024) where two older men look over the wall to see the last few remains of their imagined city. The only thing left is a barren tree with a black dog cheekily urinating on the wall beside it. “There are bound to be a few remains of the purity of childhood and adolescence that still exist deep down in these two figures,” Devito reflects. They’re no longer as nonchalant as they were while watching children build their city, or as bored as they were when they were teenagers watching their city burn. Instead, their facial expressions have been replaced by dramatic shock. All it took for their indifference to disappear was for them to grow old and for a dog to foul within the walls of their imagined city.