The special project of the “Penisola Sorrentina Arturo Esposito” Award, dedicated for the second consecutive year to visual art, coordinated by the Sannio academic Giuseppe Leone, is called “Copertina d'Autore”.
“Copertina d'Autore” intends to look at the Italian talents active in the field of visual art, in an international context. An editorial production project that will make the book of the Awards a traveling art book, because the hands will leaf through it, the network will spread it, the tourism fairs will distribute it. Not a simple yearbook of the winners, therefore, but a real catalog of profiles and stories of winners of national importance, with an author's cover that, in some way, will exalt and tell the emotions of the protagonists.
The “Penisola Sorrentina” Award, through visual art, thus reinforces its presence and its communicative suggestion within the Italian and international cultural imagination, also through the interaction of the supply chains and countries with which the event will come into contact. In this visual suggestion, how can we not remember, in fact, the advertising posters of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec that over time made the image of the artistic and cultural venues of early twentieth-century Paris famous? “Divan Japonais”, “Moulin Rouge”, “Bal Tous le soirs”, “Aristide Bruant” at the Ambassadeurs, just to name a few.
The aim of the organization, therefore, is to bring art back to an important and original form of quality, finally far from the proliferation of a series of events no longer aimed at conveying the profound message of art, by which we are overwhelmed today without any distinction between quantity and quality.
The Author's Cover will be proposed as a new form of research in the field of deserving talents and of valorization of the Campania cultural system, as a driving force for a deep, authentic, true and wise experimentation.
The artist who inaugurated the project in 2018 was the Neapolitan street artist Jorit. The author of “Maradona”, “Niccolò” and other famous murals including the one in preparation of Adriano Olivetti, christened the project last year and for the first time ever revealed his identity (until then kept mysterious in photographs) on the stage of the Delle Rose in Piano di Sorrento during the award ceremony of the “Penisola Sorrentina” Prize.
For 2019, the project “Copertina d'autore” goes from a young promise to an established and consolidated name in the international photography scene. We are talking about Giuseppe Leone, a photographer from Ragusa. The latest interpreter of a line of artistic literature that is connected to the names of Camilleri, Sciascia, Bufalino, Consolo.
Leone lives and works in his hometown. He began taking photographs in the 1950s, dedicating himself to the image of Sicily. He is an imaginative and creative interpreter of all aspects of life in Sicilian cities. In addition to the inexhaustible artistic and landscape heritage of the island, he dedicates himself to themes of custom and anthropology; in his shots we find the ancient sense of the Mediterranean, but also the transformations in modernity. Many Sicilian writers have found in his photography, always attentive, often ironic and guided by a keen sense of humor, the best illustration for their words. This has led to the creation of numerous volumes that investigate Sicilian life from the Baroque to popular festivals. He has held solo exhibitions in Italy (Milan, Palermo, Rome) and abroad (Madrid, New York, Stockholm).
From Sicily, Leone arrived in Campania last June for an “Artistic Residency”, promoted by the “Penisola Sorrentina” Award – directed by Mario Esposito – in collaboration with the Campania Region Tourism Department – directed by Corrado Matera – during which he discovered and photographed the beauties of Campania: from Sorrento to the Pompeii excavations, from Paestum to the medieval village of Teggiano, in the Vallo di Diano, in the name of an artistic journey, of the taste of se promener.
The most evocative photo, among those dedicated to the Sorrento Peninsula, will become the “Author's Cover” of 2019. A photographic cover therefore, not didactic but of free interpretation.
“I am not interested in the sensational scoop image, but in a conceptual, research, immediacy photography, since I dedicate myself to seizing the image on the fly”, says Leone. And the image will be strictly in black and white because “black and white is the interpretation of nature and its transformations, the glance that unloads an image from every tinsel to give meaning to what is the essence of what you see” concludes the artist from Ragusa.
Article published on 29 July 2019 - 10:56
