Lele Picà

“Each of us should contaminate reality, letting dreams pervade and shape our vision of the world. Each of us should be holding our own colourful balloon.”

The contamination of reality lies at the heart of Lele Picà’s research. The surrounding world is constantly contaminated and filled by the dreams of those who look at it: dreams colour it, fill it and give new momentum to the imagination. The dream is the balloon, held by a man drawn from behind who stands for each of us. The balloon bursts into every scene, imaginary or not, exactly as dreams do.

The artist identifies with the character in his works and makes him the narrator of his artistic journey: a still, motionless shadow on the canvas, a man in a hat and coat with elegant gestures, who becomes a bearer of dreams and a tourist on long journeys. The result is a visual path in which the surreal transforms the real, one the artist shares with anyone who, like him, chooses to identify with that simplified figure who, like a good friend, guides the viewer on a subjective and imaginary journey. Here the uniqueness of the sign becomes chromatic multiplicity through its obsessive repetition. The gentle man exposes himself to the viewer’s eye and invites the audience to express their own dream, which together becomes a manifold idea. Repeating the man breaks the uniqueness of the artist’s single gesture; contrasting colours and multiplied points of view create many connections between the man and the viewers, who become an endless crowd of individuals and dreams.

Light has always been the highest expression and inseparable icon of Truth and the Divine. Lele Picà builds his research on this formal principle, adding light to light to reveal more than the surface suggests: his works, sometimes abstract, sometimes figurative, are made with a strongly gestural use of material. His work shows the lesson of Spatialism and the illusionist rhetoric of the conjuring trick. With artificial light the artist reveals what natural light only partly allows, turning the material work into a metaphor with a neoclassical breath.

Manuele Spelta, known as LELE PICÀ, was born in Voghera in 1979. He graduated in Architecture from the Politecnico di Milano and works as an architect, interior designer, designer and teacher of Art History and Drawing in Pavia, where he lives. In 2011 an “illumination” gave rise to the core of his creative path; over time his enthusiasm grew into a search for materials and techniques that heighten the interplay between painting and light.