The Italian Cultural Institute – Bangkok is pleased to announce a lecture by artist Renato Leotta, “Unfolding of Time, Sensitive and Surfaces,” in which he explores the relationship between contemporary art, nature, and humanity. The lecture will be held on December 11, 2025, at Kunsthalle Bangkok, at 6:00 PM. There will be a Q&A with the artist following the lecture.
Renato Leotta is an Italian contemporary artist born in Turin in 1982. He lives and works between his hometown and Acireale, Sicily, where landscape and a dialogue with nature form the core of his research. His education, developed through individual and collective experiences, has led him to explore the relationships between art, territory, and memory. In 2019, Leotta was an Italian Fellow at the American Academy in Rome with the project “The space between earth and sky,” in which he developed a poetic and visual reflection on the interaction between natural elements and the human perception of space.
Over time, Leotta has developed a personal language that elegantly intertwines art, nature, and memory. His focus on landscape as a “living archive” is one of his strongest traits. He doesn’t impose his hand, but rather allows the tides, light, or wind to influence his work, in keeping with contemporary ecological sensibilities. Although he draws on specific contexts (Sicily, the Mediterranean landscape), the artist manages to pose universal questions about time, transformation, and perception, thanks also to his poetic use of materials: sand, terracotta, fabrics, moonlight, water: humble yet meaningful materials, used with great restraint and visual sensitivity.
In his most significant projects, Leotta allows nature itself to intervene in the creative process. In some works, for example, the tides or moonlight directly impact the material, transforming the work into a sort of collaboration between artist and environment. This method, which we might define as “ecological” in the deepest sense of the word, conveys the idea of art as a practice of listening and connection. The sea, the moon, the sand, and the wind become co-authors of a visual language in which time and space are never fixed, but always in motion.
Leotta graduated in Photography from the European Institute of Design in Turin in 2007 and the following year was awarded the Spinola Banna Foundation residency program. In 2008, he founded CRIPTA747, a Turin-based curatorial platform dedicated to promoting the most radical and experimental artistic expressions in Italy. His research investigates the relationship between landscape, memory, and culture, intertwining personal and collective dimensions. He has participated in numerous exhibitions at institutions and art centers, including the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (Turin), Le Magasin (Grenoble), Fondazione Morra Greco (Naples), Fondation Antoine De Galbert (Paris), Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Barriera (Turin), Palais des Beaux-Arts (Brussels), Galerie Nationale de l’Art (Nancy), and Palazzo Reale (Milan).
His solo exhibitions include SOLE at Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea (2020) and the 2019 project organized by the Magazzino Italian Art Foundation and Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò in New York, in which he created a poetic dialogue between the Sicilian coast, Long Island, and the Hudson Valley. He has also participated in important international exhibitions such as Manifesta 12 in Palermo (2018) and the 17th Istanbul Biennial (2022), broadening his reflection on the Mediterranean landscape as a space of cultural, political and emotional resonance, placing it in a broader global context.
