Under the Skin of the World

 

I paint what happens when boundaries break and humanity transforms into strength.

 

I am Angela Margherita Leotta (born 1974 in Catania), a Transfigurative painter with an Expressionist and visionary background, who lives and works in Como.

My painting arises from a process of internalizing social fractures linked to migration, war, violence, and psychological distress, which I empathetically absorb and rework through a language nourished by free associations and ethical questions.

My research does not indulge in passive nihilism, but adopts a possibilist stance, which raises questions about human action and the role of art in the face of existential tensions and urgencies.

I paint what still has no name and lives under the skin of the world.

I don't show the world. I open it.

My research stems from a need to penetrate the surface of the visible to bring to light what works in the depths: invisible forces that shape the body, identity, and reality itself.

In my works, the body is never stable or defined. It is a field traversed by tensions: it deforms, opens, transforms. Human, animal, and environment merge into a single organism, in which internal and external boundaries blur. Painting thus becomes a space in which matter itself reveals what normally remains hidden.

My pictorial gesture is not descriptive, but revelatory: I do not represent reality, but its occurrence.

Each work is an act of disclosure, a crossing of the flesh of the world.

My painting does not seek answers or solutions.
It inhabits contradiction, transformation, and that which cannot be fully named.

My art is the powerful cry of life "of the voiceless," sublime drama, stubborn miracle, the marvelous silence of those who, despite everything, continue to Resist.

I use oil and oil pastels, but I prefer gouache and acrylic for their immediacy and quick drying, which harmonize well with the instinctive rhythm of my gestures. I paint with hard-bristled brushes to emphasize the strength of the line and the density of the brushstrokes. Color dominates the scene, with a particular emphasis on red, a symbol of laceration but also of transformation, energy, and movement.