I Used to Be a Mountain

Amanita is pleased to present I Used to Be a Mountain, Leonardo Meoni's second solo exhibition in New York. Leonardo Meoni (b. 1994, Florence) works with a strongly material approach. His works are rooted in a three-dimensional corporeality. In close contact with the precepts of pictorial art, time, representation and gestures, Meoni empathically blurs the boundaries between genres and artistic practices by existing in an intermediate space between painting, sculpture, and drawing, emphasizing in his work the contamination of practices and different concepts towards universal hybridization. In a material game of action and subtraction, a temporality marked by the artist's movement is added to the three-dimensional aspect of his works. Leonardo lives and works in Prato, Italy. "I Used To Be I used to be a mountain, before being a parallelepiped, this long word, these lines before your eyes; before being this metal smeared by the caresses of your intent from the last twenty-four hours – what is a day your life next to the billions of years that shaped me? – (the low-ranking angel that appears in an Enzensberger poem says: nothing adds more than feldspar and the Large Magellanic Cloud) –, well, I used to be an ore; before being these figures against the grain, this story against the grain that light and a gesture and a few meters of distance finally reflect, I used to be a cocoon; before being this fold, this scratch that your crystalline lens tries to fix on the retina I used to be a memory, a fright, a sigh of L. M. that you, you all try, try to read. Try, try, because after all who today will read the mountains, who? and the ores, who will read them? the cocoons, fragile cocoons, are they read? For how long one can today imagine nonetheless we were nothing nothing more than a long a long silence. But how could one think that we could ever fit into the word: silence. Before being here not to speak of mountains, ores, mysteries and silk cocoons; before I used to be an epic poem; a philosophy treatise, an epistle, a litany well before a ballad, a novel, an idyll well, well before a chant, a day, if day existed, an epiphany who will read me? who, who will read the mountain? the mountain camouflaged as stone, the mountain camouflaged as bridge, camouflaged as floor, camouflaged as heavy bird the mountain camouflaged as nightmare, the mountain camouflaged as pedestal – what landscape is this? – the mountain camouflaged as word m-o-u-n-t-a-i-n the mountain riding on the wings of other tongues montagne; berg; montaña; montanha; un matin it dawned no longer being a mountain; the ore dressed up as desires (of gold, silver, copper, bronze – words that shine) opaque, but also as jewel, as sword, as fork and knife, as blade, as ruins or paintings pretending to be lovers of a certain L. M. smeared by pure ink pretending to be the sweat of what we call man; and still cocoons camouflaged as a vast and luxurious green velvet resisting touch only at some points so that one may glimpse the idea resisting the mutilation of this page brief, the idea polished by these mere words, the idea pretending to be someone’s dream, does someone remember? I try to remember; the idea playing the role of a correspondence between New York and São Paulo, to be a figure and leap seven thousand and six hundred and eighty kilometers high – if we believe the maps, other fictions [look closely, they are mountains bathing in the oceans] – from a painting to this screen playing at being paper to be crumpled and maybe thrown away through the window and there, out there, there is still a mountain, mountains of things watching us from the peaks of their existences and then we are silence." —Natasha Belfort Palmeira

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313 Bowery

New York, NY