Riccardo Antonio Leone, An Ordered Chaos Between Lines
Riccardo Antonio Leone, 25, a graduate from Bocconi with a MSc in Tourism Economics, is an Italian contemporary painter, sculptor, and a performance artist. His admirable portfolio, ranging from 3D pen artwork to live performances, manages to impress his followers through pieces that go beyond three dimensions: mind, body and soul.
His journey, which started around 7 years ago, started with making abstract drawings with a regular pen on recycled sheets, and quickly evolved into abstract compositions with a 3D pen. Through this revolutionary and innovative method, Riccardo creates recycled plastic threads suspended in the air, composing micro-detailed and resistant art pieces.
The idea was an introspective research in being able to design a constantly evolving dancing matter that was inside me, a filamentous, frayed internal part, through regular abstract drawings. Then I switched to using aluminium foil as a support, in order to create a hybrid between paintings and sculptures. I also used pans and all kinds of waste material that would have been otherwise thrown away. Then I experimented the transition from a regular pen to a 3D pen, opening a new set of opportunities from two dimensions to three dimensions.
@riccardo_antonio_leone
Riccardo’s artworks are deeply inspired by an inner need to transform pain into something else, “possibly beauty”, according to him. Leone compares the line to the thread that separates life from death, being from non-being, hence interconnecting surface and depth. He refers to the result that follows in his diverse abstract and figurative compositions as the “embroidery of the soul”.
According to him, “Milan is fashion, design and finance”, and as a consequence, he started developing collaborations in the fashion and design sector shaped by Milanese influences.
One of his latest projects closely explores the synergies between art and fashion. During Milan’s Women Fashion Week in 2020, Riccardo exhibited a dress that had been entirely created with a 3D pen. This one-of-a-kind piece reflected more than just creativity, it reflected the heartbreaking story of a girl that had been sexually assaulted. What might look like a very interesting dress at first glance, turns into a touching artwork that hides an obscure part of someone else’s past.
Leone later came up with the idea of creating a moodboard together with the dress, opening new possibilities and synergies with fashion and design. An entire new world had been discovered. He began creating several different fashion accessories: a 3D pair of glasses, which recalls the iconic models worn by Peggy Guggenheim; a saddle bag, which resembles the shape of the iconic (and quite popular) Dior saddle; and the sneakers , an adaptation of the renowned Nike Air Force 1.
Riccardo’s latest project is certainly different from the other ones: a live performance which combined art and dance. The concept is simple. It is inspired by a spatial nature, which addresses the topic of The Fifth Dimension, where the overcoming of the spatial and temporal planes goes beyond the 3 dimensions. The performance, called “Blue Waves’’, showcases a dancer that transforms the sound waves of the music into movements, followed by a subsequent creation of the artwork with the 3D pen being able to draw suspended in the air, the trail of the movements of the dancer and the energy that provokes in live performance. The evocation and representation is linked to the fluid –an abstract dancing material– in which sound, movement, creation, time and space go beyond.
Because of his ever evolving inner need to express himself, Riccardo Leone seeks to evolve and grow, through the following affirmation:
“Every line, every movement exudes life, every gesture extracts the flow, a continuous becoming of energy that turns into art. ”