CURA.

This strategy also appeared in the same exhibition in Leonardi’s modification of a triangular cushion glimpsed in a Lawrence Weiner video from 2002, Deep Blue Sky / Light Blue Sky. The cushion carries a simple ‘girl-scout’ style emblem of a burning campfire, framed by the name of the group (Camp Fire Girls). Leonardi has previously remade the cushion, replacing the word ‘Camp,’ which is illegible in the video due to cropping, with ‘Water,’ creating a trio of elements—FIRE, WATER, GIRLS—that splinters the phrase into three entities which could be considered an index of sculptural elements as they might be seen in Weiner’s work, which consists of: ‘language + the material referred to.’ In 2016 she created an animation of a cartoonish leg having this same triangular logo tattooed onto it, and for the Bel Ami exhibition she created her modified version of the insignia as 100 wearable patches, again summoning the symbol as conceptual décor or knowledge signaling.

It’s important to note that there is barely a person alive who would be able to decode or even recognize such arcane references to works such as these without guidance or accompanying material, despite the fact that they refer to works by canonical artists. And to add that the acknowledgment of a certain impossibility to read such work without help is not self-evident—in art it is customary to conceal any gaps in knowledge, assuming that if we didn’t know, then we should have. In its willingness to engage with the power of the niche symbol as souvenir or as social communication, Leonardi’s work shows contemporary art to be the elaborate club that it is, in which a variety of underground or specialist signs are traded and exchanged among a group of insiders.

For another recent two-person exhibition, Contiene Lengua (Contains Language, with Víctor del Moral) at Aguirre in Mexico City, Leonardi dramatized the existence of such social codes and cliques, creating paper frames printed with lettering around each of the doorways in the gallery’s exhibition spaces. These titled the area beyond each threshold as a different kind of club for different social types. A black-and-white striped frame around a cream-colored door heralded the entrance to THE ANGST CLUB, another in the same monochrome palette around a doorless frame between gallery spaces announced the passageway to the ONLY YOU CAN COMMENT CLUB, whilst another rainbow frame simply read THE CLUB CLUB CLUB CLUB. Simply by walking through a passage, our membership status is changed, and we are initiated into an ambient participation in identity codes designated by space.

Leonardi’s approach to her own social life as an artist examines such laws through more intimate means. In a series of short video portraits of a number of female friends, the artist undertakes a task with her subject. In Bleta (2015) she goes hunting with the artist Bleta Jahai, examining each part of a deer’s innards and organs with their hands after its stomach is slit open. An ominously fragment of piano from Bruno Alexiu’s 2009 score for Henri-Georges Clouzot’s unfinished film, Inferno (1964), loops over the footage, accentuating the sense that we are witnessing an initiation rite with ambivalent consequences. In the more light-hearted Michèle (2019), Leonardi and the artist Michèle Graf each play one hand of Scott Joplin’s ragtime classic The Entertainer, a piece taught to both women by their fathers. When two separate hands explore warm flesh or play an old tune together, they create a subtle awareness of female artists and their late arrival to an old game. In response, a subjectivity splits in two, a bifurcation that paradoxically binds the women to each other as they play simultaneous roles of artists and subjects. In these works Leonardi’s camera is always focused on her partner in crime, as though searching for proof that they are aware of the rite that has just taken place: that they creating rituals in order to reveal the network to which they already belong.