From 24 November to 3 December 2022
Galerie Les Yeux Fertiles, 27 rue de Seine, Paris 6e
The Galerie Les Yeux Fertiles is pleased to invite you to discover the furniture, sculptures and drawings of Leonardo Delfino (1928-2022). A catalogue is available at the gallery, or as a PDF on request.
Leonardo Delfino was born in Turin in 1928 into a traditional Italian family.
His father was himself an artist, and his childhood was marked by the Mussolini era and the economic hardship that drove the family to emigrate to Argentina in 1936.
He was a pupil as brilliant as he was unruly. Expelled from school at fourteen, he prepared on his own for the entrance examination of the École des Beaux-Arts in Buenos Aires, which he passed brilliantly… before leaving after a few months. Art interested him from a very early age: he was only seventeen when he discovered a drawing by Jacques Hérold, the Surrealist artist whom he would later know in Paris.
His vocation led him to use his manual skills to make a living; thus he built several studios while studying under an anarchist painter.
Delfino was then strongly influenced by realism and socialism, and found his models among the people of the street.
A self-taught artist, passionate about literature and poetry, he was all his life a great reader, admiring the classics (Tolstoy, London, Nietzsche, Dante, etc.) as much as his contemporaries.
His first loves were drawing and painting, his original training.
His reputation grew notably through exhibitions at the Rubbers gallery and his participation in cultural gatherings in the circle of Romero Brest, the art critic who then dominated artistic life in Buenos Aires. It was the time of the “frescoists” such as Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros.
He was not yet twenty-five.
His meeting with the woman who would become his wife, Olga, transformed his life. From a Russian family, she was cultured, a music lover and a sculptor herself.
They decided to marry and move to Paris. It was 1959, a time when Paris was bubbling with activity.
The first days in the French capital were hard but, like him, other young Argentine artists had made the crossing and, very quickly, Delfino turned to sculpture and experimented with a new creative language, focusing on metal, the “scrap iron” he salvaged and worked with screws.
Between 1961 and 1963, as part of the Biennale des jeunes, “thirty Argentines of the new generation”, he held his first exhibition with Pablo Curatella Manes at the Galerie Creuze, alongside Alicia Penalba and Guzmán.
His work in steel and his taste for large formats attracted the attention of a young American gallerist, Darthea Speyer, marking the start of a long collaboration. Between 1970 and 1999 they organised eight exhibitions together, making Speyer THE gallerist of Delfino.
The Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris holds two works by the artist from this period.
From his first sculptures, the central question was that of the organic and of “reality masked by the exterior”. Raoul Jean Moulin marvelled at these “knotted, tumultuous forms that open out all the better” and at these volutes that transfigure the poverty of the material.
He also exhibited at the Salons de Mai (from 1966 to 1980) and in the gardens of the American Cultural Centre with Albert Féraud on the theme “Seven propositions for metal”.
Like Féraud, and like the other “metal-poets” Guino, César and Hiquily, he revisited the techniques of assembly and welding, exploiting every possibility offered by metal to create a new language.
His works are distinguished by a rhythm, a sinuous linearity and a suppleness that underline the artist’s perfect technical mastery of the material.
He found his first Paris studio with the German sculptor Colas Geissler, on rue de Clignancourt, and divided it in two to share it with the painter Corneille. On his advice, the owner of the premises (originally a joinery) converted them, which allowed Peter Klasen and Breyten Breytenbach to move in as well.
Very open, Delfino and his wife were in contact with many artists such as Eduardo Jonquières, also Argentine (whose paintings recall those of Vasarely), and Julio Cortázar.
Around 1965 he gave up steel to return to a more classical practice of clay modelling, fixing his plaster casts with laminated epoxy resin, which required meticulous finishing work. This resin was to become his material of choice. Very strong, easy to mould and light, it requires many stages before achieving a finished material with bronze-like glints that heighten the bewitching aspect of his highly distinctive sculpture.
He then developed anatomical works that delighted his contemporaries, who praised the “bouquets of muscles and viscera giving birth to hybrid creatures to which he imparts a fascinating lyricism”.
The 1970s were the years of recognition, but also those in which he pursued his quest to create a phantasmagorical world in which black is a colour as sensual as it is funereal.
Delfino held one exhibition after another, in Paris and the provinces and internationally (Venice and Budapest biennials, open-air sculpture exhibitions in Seoul…), and above all received prizes and commissions: sculpture-tables and seats for the Musée d’Art Moderne; a sculpture commissioned by Jacques Toubon for the Place Nationale…
He was allocated a studio-flat on passage Ricaut, where he mixed with Jacques Hérold, Edgard Pillet and Andrée Honoré while continuing to work in his studio on rue de Clignancourt.
Naturalised French in 1975, he travelled widely, in Europe as well as South America and Egypt.
He overturned the representation of the body, driven by a fertile imagination that allowed him to reinvent reality. He isolated anatomical elements, took them out of context and combined them while modifying them. Sculpture is a language, and Delfino sought to create a language of his own, combining interiority and objective reality.
With the development of open-air sculpture museums and cultural policies, some towns committed themselves to artistic development, and many artists accompanied them, such as Ipoustéguy, Viseux and… Delfino.
In 1978 the town of Vitry-sur-Seine granted him a plot of land on which to build his studio.
He worked there until 2017… when health problems combined to curb his creative drive, forcing him first to give up large formats and then to devote himself to drawing once more.
In 1980 one of his works was installed on the Quai Saint-Bernard in Paris, in the open-air sculpture museum.
He received the commission for a monumental work for La Défense, on the forecourt of the Technip company. He worked on it for four years, and it was inaugurated in 1984 by Jack Lang, then Minister of Culture, further enhancing the artist’s aura. “Lien du corps” stands out through its monumentality in a business district then in full property, but also artistic, development, since works by Calder, Miró, Agam and César stand beside the ever-rising towers.
The 1990s marked a development in his creative language. His search for balance between tubular and knotted lines was accompanied by the introduction of geometric forms. Combining geometric, organic and natural elements, he created “a new harmony of opposites”. His technique was renewed too, and he gave up casting for assembly. While the glossy black remained, red made its appearance. The appearance of totems, and more broadly the multiplication of vertical elements, reflects his search for balance.
The red of Life stands against the black of Death, while the use of hands, blood vessels and other realistic details evokes a certain violence, but also “time consuming itself, life dissolving into the void”.
At the end of the 2000s Delfino withdrew from the art scene. He left the passage Ricaut studio and settled on rue d’Arcueil. Exhibitions became rarer…
Two successive knee operations forced him to reduce his creative activity. He began by reducing the size of his works before returning to his first love: drawing. He then alternated precise drawings and more inward works.
The expiry of the lease on his Vitry studio, in 2018, led him to move all his works to rue d’Arcueil.
His friends and family then approached the Académie des Beaux-Arts to produce a superb monograph, a retrospective of the work of an exceptional artist.
His recent death makes a tribute to the career of this complete artist absolutely essential, to bring back into the full light one who was among the most accomplished creators of the second half of the twentieth century
Diane de Karajan
