FPT Industrial, in Collaboration with Artissima, Promotes the FPT for Sustainable Art Award to Support Sustainability in Contemporary Art

The company adds another stepping stone on a path started in 2019, when it became the Main Sponsor of the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, and promoter of the installation Consider yourself as a guest (Cornucopia) by Christian Holstad (1972 Anaheim, California). The artist conceived a huge cornucopia, an ancient symbol of luck and abundance, made entirely from plastic waste. The work, a reflection on the urgency of addressing pollution of the seas and oceans around the world, after being exhibited at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, was exhibited at Artissima 2019.

This year, FPT Industrial reaffirms its dialogue with the art fair by presenting the FPT for Sustainable Art award, a prize to select, through an international jury, the artist whose research and works are the result of a conceptual and sustainable virtuous production process.

“The award is a tool to investigate sustainability in the creative process in a broader sense, highlighting how each artwork is the result of an evolution that encounters, in all its phases, people, materials, lives, and which must find harmony between organizational, logistical and economic mechanisms”, states Carlo Moroni, Head of Communication, FPT Industrial. “A symmetry between the FPT brand and a way to enhance the commitment that the company places, not only on offering products that are as sustainable as possible, but also the careful attention paid to and responsibility of its production chains and processes”.

The jury, composed of Marianne Dobner, Curator at MUMOK in Vienna, Andrea Lissoni, Director of the Haus der Kunst in Munich, Luca Lo Pinto, Director of Rome’s MACRO, has named artist Renato Leotta as the winner of the award, declaring: “Renato Leotta has shown his artistic practice to be based on the process of establishing contact between human and non-human conditions in a poetic manner, and by using natural phenomena as production tools in his works. Seemingly minimalist, Leotta’s work tackles significant environmental issues without becoming documentary: MARE (2019) presents a new approach to a traditional genre such as landscape painting, reinterpreting its process and transforming the landscape itself into the medium that produces reality”.

Renato Leotta, who exhibited at Artissima with the Madragoa gallery of Lisbon, presented the work MARE within the framework of the Artissima Unplugged Stasi Frenetica exhibition at the GAM – Public Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Turin. The work is a “horizon” belonging to the canvas series created in different shades of blue that the artist partially immersed in the sea and then left on the beach, to dry, under the sun: the physical phenomenon of salt crystallization brings out texture on the blue surface, thus tracing a perfect horizon on fabrics.

“In my work I try to observe nature through a process that is not just inspiration, but a reciprocal exchange; it is a contemplative approach rather than a planning one”, says Renato Leotta. "The FPT for Sustainable Art award captures the importance of how the elaboration of artistic creation, which from abstract becomes practical, must consider a coherence that involves all its phases".

In this work, as in all his research, the artist reveals a unique aptitude linked to the observation and representation of the landscape: the traces of the action of natural elements – the sea, the earth, trees and their fruits, air, living beings – become the medium and the subject at the same time, creating works in which what is real and imagined merge.

Renato Leotta | Biography
Renato Leotta (Turin, 1982) lives and works in both Acireale and Turin. In 2019, he was Italian Fellow in Visual Arts at the American Academy in Rome.
In 2020, his works were exhibited as part of the collective exhibition Maxxi Bulgari Prize at the MAXXI National Museum of XXI Century Arts, Rome; the same year he presented the solo exhibition Lighea at the Galleria Fonti, Naples, and his solo show Sole at Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art.
In 2019, he held a solo show at the Magazzino Italian Art Foundation and Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, New York. In 2018, Eine Sandsammlung at the Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, St. Gallen and, in 2016, Aventura at the Galeria Madragoa, Lisbon. Among the group exhibitions in which he took part we note: Garden of Earthly Delights at the Gropius Bau Berlin, and The Piedmont Pavilion, Combo, Venice, 2019; Manifesta 12, Palermo and Italy Matriz do Tempo Real, MAC, Sao Paulo, 2018; Intuition, Palazzo Fortuny, Venice, and Pompeii@Mother, Archaeological Matter, Museo Madre, Naples, 2017; XVI National Quadrennial of Art in Rome, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome and TERRAE NUBILUS, NAK, Aachen, 2016. Leotta is co-founder of CRIPTA747 in Turin.