When, in 1979, Mother Canopi, abbess of the Mater Ecclesiae monastery on the island of San Giulio, asked me to carve a wooden statue of Saint Benedict for her community, my experience as a sculptor amounted to a couple of olivewood statuettes roughly whittled with a pocketknife and a few visits to the emergency room to have my hands patched up: they bore the brunt of my rudimentary preparation.
I knew neither the right tools for the job nor, still less, the technique. I did know how to draw, but not because I had attended art school: I had learned during the long hours I spent, between the ages of six and eight, silently watching my uncle at work, the illustrator Aurelio Galleppini, known as Galep. To his admirers he was the incomparable creator of the Tex Willer comics; to me, he was the painter of two overwhelming oil portraits of my grandparents and of splendid gouaches: views of the landscapes to which my origins are tied and seascapes of the Ligurian Riviera.
There: I have named the two people to whom I owe most for becoming what I already was: a sculptor.
But it was when I was entrusted with creating the furnishings for an entire church, the parish church of San Rocco al Porto, that I understood it was not enough to have replaced the pocketknife with gouges, and olivewood with less picturesque but more workable timbers. Drawing and painting had been in my blood from birth; as a sculptor, however, I still felt inexperienced. I needed a master, a true one: someone who had a clear idea of the difference between sculpture and non-sculpture, and knew how to teach it.
And so, in 1986, I met the master Gino Cosentino. He had been a pupil of the great Arturo Martini, one of the foremost sculptors of the Italian Novecento. Martini boasted of having learned from sculptors of every age and every latitude. In meeting Gino, I had found not only him!
From Cosentino I learned, along with merciless rules about what sculpture must be, to love stone.
Ever since, stone and I have had a score to settle, and we often find ourselves locked in hand-to-hand combat.
In 1993 I held my first solo sculpture exhibition in Milan, at the Antico Oratorio della Passione.
Other solo exhibitions: Baveno in 1994; Piacenza and Bibbona in 1998; the Noy Center in Milan in 2004; Spazioporpora in Milan in 2018; Galleria Artè in Milan in 2023.
Group exhibitions include: the Premio Suzzara in 1993 and 1994; the first “Città di Piacenza” Art Biennale in 1997 (first prize for sculpture); Etruriarte in 1998 and 1999; “Artexpo” in New York in 1999; the first and second “Radicondoli-Belforte” international sculpture exhibitions in 1999 and 2000; the “Gruppo del Vento” group exhibition at the San Rossore estate in 2000; the “Elisir Art Gallery” in Mola di Bari in 2001 and 2002; La scuola di Cosentino in Bergamo in 2003; Artisti d’Italia, organised by Orizzonte Italia at Villa Belgioioso in Arcore, in 2020.
Publications and reviews: “Cielo e Terra”, catalogue of the 1993 solo exhibition, with texts by Mario de Micheli and Franco Tedeschi; “Catalogo della scultura italiana n. 10”, G. Mondadori, 1995; catalogues of the first and second “Radicondoli-Belforte” exhibitions, 1999 and 2000; article by Maria Dora Di Giacomo in “Senza Titolo”, year 1, no. 2; text by Gianpiero Gianazza in the catalogue for the exhibition La scuola di Cosentino in 2003; text by Andrea Colombo in the catalogue for the exhibition Artisti d’Italia in 2020; article by Guido Folco in the magazine Italia Arte in 2023.
SANDRO LEONARDI