Nese Selamoglu in Conversation with Artist Riccardo Antonio Leone

Riccardo Antonio Leone is an Italian emerging contemporary artist based in Venice and Milan whose creative utilisation of 3D Pen Art has intrigued art lovers around the world. Stemming from a personal need for salvation, the artist’s practice involves drawing with recycled plastic suspended in mid-air, often live to music and trailing the movements of a dancer. His resulting abstract and figurative compositions are curiously complex and mirror Leone’s attempt to transform pain into beauty through innovation.

To learn more about Leone’s self-proclaimed “embroidery of the soul,” MADE IN BED caught up with the artist to chat about his newest series entitled Fifth Dimension and Fluids.

Riccardo Antonio Leone.

Nese Selamoglu: What is your motivation behind creating artwork using 3D pens? Do you prefer it to a regular pen?

Riccardo Antonio Leone: The 3D Pen is the arrival of an evolutionary process and it starts with the first works made by Bic Pen on paper, so it’s passing from the two-dimensional to the three-dimensional. It enables us to create art suspended in the air and shape the material that comes out of the 3D pen: recycled plastic. The act of being able to draw suspended in the air has a strong visual and evocative power. It’s a work of intertwining lines that overlap, almost creating orderly chaos. Making art stemmed from my need for salvation. Isolation, loss of relationships, silence, emptiness, lack of emotions, not communicating for years, and the risk of suicide are the foundations of where my art stands. It was a desperate, but also vital, and energetic attempt to cling onto the threads–just like the thin lines of the artworks–in order to return back to life. Art represented a way of reaffirming myself, extracting beauty from pain; something no one had ever wanted to see deep inside of me. It worked as a sort of redemption, a path of resilience to transform and shape the negative into the positive. At that point, you either succumb or change. Art was my survival.

Live Performance in Venice, 2022. 3D Pen, recycled plastic, dance, techno sound. Photo by Toto Da Mosto.

NS: What are the fundamental elements of combining dance with performing 3D Pen Art in front of a live audience?

RAL: My research was mostly about crossing space and time in the fifth dimension. It involved creating a deformed fluid made with the 3D pen; it was not necessary to reach a place, but to cross through–the fifth dimension. This overcomes the limits of space-time, ultimately breaking the third and fourth dimensions, and thus lacks a beginning and an end. It accepts only the eternal becoming that binds itself to the fluid that comes out of the 3D pen, without a predefined form that could continue to develop indefinitely in a spatial conception that takes up and elaborates the works of Lucio Fontana.

3D Pen, recycled plastic. Photo by Camilla Zaccheo.

NS: Please tell us more about your most recent series 5th Dimension and Fluids and what inspired you to start the series.

RAL: The last live performance I made was at the European Cultural Centre in Venice in June 2022 which was called Tentacles at ArtNight. The performance consists of three elements: I, the artist, who creates, the dancer, and the sounds of techno music. I created the trail of the movements of the dancer who was dancing. The fifth dimension, which is the essence of performance, is in fact a state of flow. Moving Tentacles involves the creation of a fluid or abstract and deformed matter whose interweaving of lines leads to the creation of a network, a prison of twists that start from the top in a more marked and massive way, almost as if it were a coral. They extend and descend, thinning, becoming much finer and more fragile, to trap the eye of the beholder. A physical network, as humans are physically made, and a digital network of connections in a fluid contemporary world. This wandering of the lines questions who we are and who we will be, in what form, time, and space.

Live Performance in Venice, 2022. 3D Pen, recycled plastic, dance, techno sound. Photo by Chiara Dalla Rosa.

NS: Your artwork reminds me of delicate embroidery, perfectly designed for each different individual. Does fashion play a part in your decision-making process?

RAL: The starting point of all artistic research was based on the ‘embroidery of the soul,’ that is, not the defined external part but the internal, hidden part. Dancing itself is a matter of continuous abstract and deformed evolution. It was a very intimate and profound job of being able to dig deeper. There have been some works in the fashion field with important and delicate synergies, but the main focus remains in the art field where it has more personal meaning.

Riccardo Antonio Leone, Infanzia, 2020. 3D Pen, recycled plastic.

NS: Do you believe 3D Pen art will get more recognition in the art world?

RAL: The filamentous fluids I create have a distinctive and recognisable shape, and the style of my art is thanks to a very evocative visual power that can be sucked into those filaments as if they were jellyfish tentacles. But above all, the concept of the fifth dimension and fluidity touches contemporary chords and by asking questions that can change your way of seeing.

All images are courtesy of the artist.

Thanks to Riccardo Antonio Leone on behalf of MADE IN BED.

To learn more about Riccardo Antonio Leone, follow him on Instagram.

Nese Selamoglu

Interviews Co-Editor, MADE IN BED