I leoni dell’Arsenale – Lion (light blue)

I Leoni dell’Arsenale are a lion and a lioness.

The first sketches of the lions are from 2019, after I came across them on my way to the Art Biennale to add them to my ongoing research on works of antiquity.
I have portrayed two of the four lions that have been guarding the land gate of the Arsenale since they were brought from Greece to Venice as spoils of war in 1687. I focused on the crouching lion, with its full, regal muzzle, known as the Hephaisteion lion, of Attic origin from the 4th century BC, and on the one that to me is a lioness. More ancient, from the 7th century BC, it seems to have come from the Terrace of the Lions on the island of Delos. Sitting on its hind legs, it resembles representations of Middle Eastern lions, taking us even further. In drawing them, I was especially interested in their expression, rapt and absorbed.

In this last, incredible period, which we have all experienced, I have been lucky enough to be able to go to Venice often, together with my partner, who was born there, and to get to know a different city, new compared to the one we knew before the closures imposed by the pandemic.
It is in this real but emptied city, in savouring the wonder mixed with melancholy, in the recovery of the spaces by those who live there, in the amazement and questions about how to rebuild a sociality and an economy that is not only based on mass tourism, that I had the desire to do something that would be a tangible contribution, like a homage to this city, because starting again is always possible, because art moves and builds.

So in November 2020, thanks to an article I read in Made In Mind Magazine, I discovered Gianpaolo Fallani's silk-screen printing workshop: he had recently hosted artists in residence and I went to visit him. I had always wanted to experiment with silkscreen printing, and I felt I wanted to experience it there, in this art workshop, which since 1968 has been a meeting place for international craftsmen and creativity, and which had been hit hard by the high water in November 2019 and was trying to regain normality after the shutdown of 2020.

In February 2021, in my temporary studio in Milan, I will create six paintings on cardboard, 80 x 120 cm, depicting lions chosen from my archive on antiquities. Along with those taken from my explorations in the archaeological museums of Athens and Berlin or from Italian Renaissance discoveries, I also paint the two lions from the Arsenale, plus one taken from a wooden statue, also Venetian. Both stand out from the other felines, they actually look like a couple, something they have in common in their colours and brushstrokes.

A month later I went back to Fallani, and I knew what to achieve with him. And so it was. At the end of April 2021, working alongside Gianpaolo for a week, I watched with surprise as, day by day, layer by layer, these beautiful silkscreen works came to life.

This project is like a breath, it contracts and stretches, it brings us near and far, it gives us a glimpse of the world from different temporal and calamity perspectives, it creates semantic bridges between places and epochs, connecting different dimensions of existence, made up of branches, discoveries, amalgamations and movement. Venice is very young because it is full of history and narratives, like these two flamboyant and dreamy lions.