Leonardo Meoni

Working mainly on velvet, Leonardo Meoni's work falls somewhere between painting, sculpture, and drawing, blurring the boundaries between various artistic genres and practices. Meoni uses a variety of objects to create impressions on velvet: from his fingers to brushes, gardening equipment, kitchen utensils, and construction tools. In this way, his images are the fruit of an almost performative gesture involving the printing of shapes that, once marked on the surface of the velvet, can neither be erased nor removed. The artist not only thinks of the act of erasure through the medium he works with, but it is also often what he illustrates on his velvet canvases: a range of statues and artifacts that have been deliberately destroyed or damaged in an attempt to rid the objects of their symbolic function.