The Alfonso Leto archive presents its new atelier by offering a view of 10 works of its production from the 1980s for the Giornata del Contemporaneo. These are works that characterized the beginning of his formation and development of a maturation and a personal language, in those particular years marked by the trans-avant-garde and by the reinvention of a possible vitality of the language of art through a painting aware of its own role of and linguistic and cultural repositioning, in the changes of that decade.. Some of the works in this selection were part of Leto's first major personal exhibition (1987), presented by Achille Bonito Oliva and Fulvio Abbate, held in the seventeenth-century hermitage of Quisquina, in the Sicani mountains, precisely in the places where the artist is born and resides and develops his work: demonstrating an ancient relationship of resistance and persistence of his role as an artist in a Sicily that was seeing the birth of the new Gibellina and the Orestiadi Foundation (promoted by Ludovico Corrao), "Museum" in Bagheria (the collection of contemporary art by Ezio Pagano) and the first steps of the Fiumara d'Arte (the multifaceted laboratory of Antonio Presti). All realities with which Leto has interacted over the years. The close relationship with the Palermo of those years was of fundamental importance, in the environments characterized by the active presence of Gaetano Testa, Toti Garraffa, Francesco Carbone and Giacomo Baragli.
Some other works on display today were part of the solo show at the Voltaire gallery in Palermo, presented by Francesca Alfano Milgietti, in 1988.
Representing them today has a meaning that goes beyond the re-enactment (personal or contextual): it is a small domestic test experiment of the intrinsic value of these images, an experiment that was already offered in a much broader and more documented formula in the last exhibition retrospective dedicated to the artist held in 2018 in Palermo, at Palazzo Sant'Elia, curated by Marco Meneguzzo (produced by the Orestiadi Foundation, in the program of «Palermo Capital of Culture»).