MARIO DE LEO: THE BROKEN ROOTS
I. The cerebral machine is made up of millions of skilled cells, the neurones, each one working as a computer, i.e. it works out the received information and transfers the result of its processing to other millions cells. Numberless cells in steady unrest, squalls of impetus, states of threshold, a mechanism that reproduces even outside the human brain, in the rush hour crowd, in the megalopolis, in the wide airport junctions.
Mechanisms. And they are mechanism, the universes reproduced by Mario De Leo, printed and weld circuits, electronic components, condensers, a dimension that shows at the same time the inside and the outside of one brain, being it human or electronic.
Mario De Leo creates the space where it is possible to perceive the silence of mind, the space where one can hear the turning sound, the space where one can start perceiving a universe. A space where he inserts a dimension spiritual and technological at the sarne time. In Mario De Leo’s works, he creates the situations of a scientific theory of fickleness, patterns of inside articulation that don’t correspond to any of the real functions but they cause mental defences; De Leo creates images as phenomenon of intuition, observers of a cosmic dimension asking for mechanisms to be able to show themselves. Structures. Structures of future buildings like brains, human and electronic one, plan of spaces in which it’s the mind that creates practicabilities and disturbances, views of a production whose effort is the realisation of a plastic language coded towards the elaboration of a perceptive system done for minimum elements.
2. Fragments. The etymology of “fragment” comes from the latin word “frangere” that appears in the whole production of De Leo. De Leo incessantly introduces portions of universes, mechanisms selected in their fragments, suspensions, fractures, caught by chance from the existence on an entire never given, supposed, existing just for evocation. De Leo’s fragments are schemes of cerebral edges lines, strengths examples, accidents of running.
No element supporting this kind of supposed running, no explanation for the phenomenons which origins those runnings, De Leo gives birth to microscopical and isolated thresholds of potential re-constructions of a space of enunciation. A system of details in which “the entire” is completely vanished, and this is one of the most scientific intuitions of Mario De Leo. In the introduction to “The new coalition”, Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stenghers explain one of the big changes of contemporary science “… Today, we find ourselves in a world full of risks, a world in which reversion and determinism are applied only to simple, restricted situations, while irreversibility and indeterminateness are the rule.” In other words, the explanation of phenomenon as chains of elements generated from a repeated number of regulations has been overcome by the idea of a fragmented universe made up of elements, different for places and qualities. The universe of Mario De Leo is far many aspects similar to the scientific universe in which the fragment often is the entire, too, where a slice of space is the totality of space, where a sliver of running is the running.
3. Areas. Mario De Leo paintings form the temper of a series of forces in tension. His structures are characterised by his constant experimentation of the flexibility of one edge, they take shape as areas, portions of a stuff that recalls a running mechanism, without revealing nor the mechanism neither the function. De Leo acts in a space of temporal hanging and his references overlook this dimension (in titles and in his declarations), to a spiritual dimension. According to this view, his mechanisms become traced by an order that creates a self-isolation, an area of reflection and meditation that gives the start to a supposed orienting towards a universal order of things, an order that keeps, however, the pressure of a dynamics of complexity in which the chaos is the element creating stability.
4. An operation of edge, the one followed by Mario De Leo, edge between the ecstatic and the aesthetic, where ecstatic means the state that place itself outside the rational mind and aesthetic the state inside a rationality of sensation.
Francesca Alfano Miglietti, 1994