"The litany of extinction" Painting

Leandro Russo was born in 1973 in Giarre, Catania. He graduated in Business Banking at the University of Messina, but decides to change his fate by returning to its primordial passion: painting. Begins a journey by himself that brings him to explore different techniques including watercolor that becomes the medium of his elective expressive figuration. He lives and works in Milan. STATEMENT I flood my paintings with water. In most cases I work directly on the support rests on a horizontal plane without preparing sketches or studies, and I let myself be guided by instinct and the watercolor techniques allows me to externalize everything at a glance. This requires a physical and gesture readiness: I move the canvas continuously to control the movements of the water that slides and sometimes imposes its dynamics. The ecoline, the inks and watercolors are the main tools to create, to tell the space that we occupy; but also the places that you will lose or have already lost: childhood places, places of origin, or that could have been. The theme of the landscape is an excuse to explore a lanuage as unusual as possible, and to do so I went along with the water so as to leave open field to creative moments of unconscious level and ensure a limited control over the media. I constantly run after the color in extreme situations of creation; For this reason I almost never prepare sketches, or if I start with an idea formed in my mind, this is inevitably only a starting point. In latest productions I began to compress more the water element, trying to snatch more moments of control and being able to create a texture in the color as a kind of layering that as in “geology” represent a vertical succession of layers mutually separated by physical surfaces of discontinuity, said plans or joints of stratification. These layers are due to variations in the speed of sedimentation of the color (pigment precipitation that clings to the canvas), and then the transport capacity and the selection of the water. In doing so I create my worlds.