It is with an air of nostalgia that I enter the studio of Bruno Leti. I’m still questioning what it is about all the ingredients of his practice that produce this affect. It’s not a feeling of longing, or registering an absence, rather a sensitivity to the time keeping that exists in Leti’s works. Across mediums and decades, I hear an echo of sites, cultures, architects, the work of other artists, and composers being introduced into his process. In this recent body of work the artist lassos some of these gestures under the notion of an ‘assonance’, alluding to the strategy of a poet.
Bruno Leti, Vivace, 2016, diptych, oil on linen, 37 x 42cm. Courtesy the artist and Nicholas Thompson Gallery, Melbourne
‘Assonances’ includes all his making – painting, drawing, monotypes, photography and artist books. Leti has maintained multiple and simultaneous crafts. I use the word ‘craft’ for his dedication and resilience makes him a master of each of these mediums. Leti knows his craft. It’s in viewing each of these separately and collectively, that his place as a significant Australian artist is confirmed.
Habitually, he returns to key stimuli, histories and landscapes. In this show we see the way these strategies have played out. The way a form, colour, or pictorial device can be translated, tessellated, repeated; from one work and medium to the next. This ‘echo’ like a song; written, sung, played by Leti himself – for Leti himself – ‘assonates’ across each moment of every work.
Bruno Leti, Vivo, 2015, diptych, oil on linen, 37 x 42cm. Courtesy the artist and Nicholas Thompson Gallery, Melbourne
So, perhaps nostalgia is the wrong word? What I feel is firstly rich, holistic and enjoyable. Leti is an artist whom I associate with a generation of Australian painters I encountered in art journals or slide talks as an undergraduate student. Maybe I am drawn to label it as such because his pieces often function like letters or memoirs. Their affect is layered and historiographical. Leti emigrated to Australia as a child in 1952 from Italy. He is biographically a postmodernist painter, and much of his way teases forms of appropriation and universal critique so known to that period. At the same time, his work keeps a foot in modernism (quite romantically so) while his approach to history and subject matter; particularly language, prose and the multiple, and the (often contradictory) vocabularies of painting and architecture that he employs; place him in a contemporary space.
The artist thinks laterally, crossing landscapes, stories and memories and traversing mediums. Reference to the work of Piet Mondrian and Giorgio Morandi is just as palpable as his commitment to the flat Australian landscape. As it would be, considering his geographic chronology, his life has oscillated, both mentally and physically between a regional Victorian coming-of-age and a post-war childhood just outside of Rome.
Bruno Leti, Intonaco Pastel 2, 2015, Pastel on 350gsm Fabriano Liscio, 76 x 70cm. Courtesy the artist and Nicholas Thompson Gallery, Melbourne
I don’t think that the Australian landscape, or any notion of it in fact, can always be accessed through a formal ‘historical’ lens. However Leti has carved out a specific way of engaging with the land that permits this via a European vocabulary, the palette of the Australian terrain, and importantly his longevity of commitment. The romantic gaze is not operational in his definition of landscape or of the artist, but rather with a sincere joy in wearing ‘the hat of the artist’. He cherishes the privilege to see and share what one sees.
Making sense of such place-making for a lifetime produces honest artworks. As much as we sense a building chorus, there are also pauses. Leti has spent four decades refining his touch. The work is technically precise, and beautiful, and claims its own form of temporality. It’s as if the work(s) are in a dance of their own, they are in assonance with themselves. We all bring part of ourselves to an encounter with art. My own experience of engaging with a nation’s notion of ‘landscape’ is one which, while always difficult and problematic, offers so much in return. And still this is never enough, we seek more, we hope for more – there is much more work to be done.
In ‘Assonances’ Bruno Leti invites us to ‘listen’ to his representations of seeing through material practices. For decades now, the practice of locating oneself in the world geographically, culturally, aesthetically – through language, form and history; is Bruno Leti’s everyday exercise.
Fernando do Campo is an artist, writer and curator. He is Associate Lecturer at UNSW Art + Design, Sydney.
Nicholas Thompson Gallery
24 June to 16 July, 2017
Melbourne
