- Fiorenza: Ribbons of Power: Bruno Leti, edited by Jenny Zimmer. Australian Scholarly Publishing, $69.95.
At the age of 80, Bruno Leti is a veteran artist in the Australian art scene. Leti is a household name in Australian printmaking circles and as a painter, draughtsman and photographer, he is well-known amongst Australian artists. He has been exhibiting in Canberra for several decades, most recently at the Beaver Galleries.
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Soft spoken, sociable and urbane, Leti's studios in the Carlton-Collingwood area are a fixture in the Melbourne art landscape. Although he has lived in Victoria since 1951, arriving when he was aged 10, his Italian ancestry has never been far from the surface.
He was born in the picturesque medieval town of Roccantica, perched on a steep hill 70 kilometres north-east of Rome, and has subsequently visited Italy on innumerable occasions. He is bilingual and has collaborated with Italian artists, book artists, poets and philosophers.
Unlike some Australia-based artists from the Italian diaspora, Leti has never sought to illustrate memories of "old Italy", as for example in Salvatore Zofrea's work, but his Italian heritage is apparent throughout his art.
Like a number of other Italian-born artists resident in Australia, including George Baldessin and Domenico de Clario, Leti did return to Italy to further his art education and experience of art, in his case in 1982 when he spent three months at Grafica Uno in Milan working with the master printer Giorgio Upiglio.
This book documents Leti's most recent venture that started with a trip to his beloved city of Florence or Fiorenza in Italian. Anyone who visits historic Florence is inevitably drawn to the cluster of majestic buildings in the heart of the old city with the cathedral, baptistery and belltower.
Historically and geographically, they mark the spot where medieval Italy appeared at its most glorious late flowering and the first seeds of the Italian Renaissance had taken root and started to flourish. These included the two sets of bronze doors on the baptistery by Lorenzo Ghiberti and the breathtaking dome of the cathedral by Filippo Brunelleschi.
Leti, in crisp photographs, captures aspects of historic Florence that are reproduced in the book.
Also, as is his custom, in his sketchbook in pen and ink and gouache he made scores of quick sketches, some impressions of the characters and buildings that he has encountered, but more significantly designs for bigger artworks that will grow out of the precious historic townscape. Pages from these sketchbooks are also reproduced in the book.
The polychrome horizontal stripes that are such a feature of Italian Gothic architecture and especially the buildings of Florence were Leti's original starting point for his exploration of the so-called ribbons of power, the sub-title of this book.
Back in his studio in Collingwood, Leti working on large scale photographs from his field trip to Florence, manipulated the images with painterly gestural marks. The images became enlivened and inhabited with sometimes gradated colour panels, reminiscent of the colour scale of Giorgio Morandi, being locked into parts of the polychrome facades.
On other occasions, sculptural decorations or people from the street are allowed to penetrate the picture space and enter the compositions.
These manipulated photographs were subsequently rescanned and then occasionally manipulated further until they appeared to the artist completely resolved. Leti arrived at a series of 20 sizeable prints, each measuring 67 by 100 centimetres. These make up the Fiorenza suite that were printed as inkjet prints and were realised in an edition of five. All 20 prints are reproduced as double page spreads in this book.
It is interesting that an artist who made his reputation through wonderful delicate etchings, bold colour saturated monotypes, whimsical relief prints and atmospheric lithographs, at the age of 80 has reinvented himself by embracing digital printmaking.
Like many artists, Leti dislikes labels but throughout his life has generally worked in a non-figurative mode favouring soft organic forms. These digital prints are set within recognisable architectural settings and celebrate strong geometric forms that were last evident in his art many decades ago.
Many artists as they get older start to repeat themselves or revisit favourite themes of their youth but expressed with a revived technical virtuosity. Leti is an example of an artist who believes in regeneration through reinvention.
Although in the past, elements of Roman and Italian sculptural reliefs have crept into his art or we have caught glimpses of Italian topography, the Fiorenza suite of digital prints marks a new beginning from the veteran artist.
