Lucia Leuci – Merda e luce
With a text by Caterina Molteni
from May 30 to June 17, 2025
Gelateria Sogni di Ghiaccio, via Tanari Vecchia, 5/A 40121 Bologna
Gelateria Sogni di Ghiaccio (Bologna) is pleased to present Merda e luce, a solo exhibition by Lucia Leuci, inspired by Antonio Moresco‘s theatrical collection of the same name (Effigie Edizioni, 2006). The exhibition project proposes an intense and layered reflection on the relationship between body and spirituality, sacred and profane, beauty and marginality. Through a sculptural practice that over the years has been distinguished by the variety of materials and techniques used, Leuci constructs an aesthetic and symbolic imaginary that interrogates the codes of decorum and identity, articulating a poetic of waste and excess.
Like Moresco’s work, Leuci’s research moves along a line of tension between matter and transcendence, language and flesh, everyday gesture and vision. His sculptures and installations emerge as fragments of an urban landscape traversed by visible and invisible wounds: cracks in the asphalt, hostile architecture, removed presences. In these spaces of friction, the artist identifies places of resistance and possibility.
Among the subjects inhabiting the exhibition are the so-calledmaranza andmaranzine, adolescents recognizable by a highly coded, exuberant and provocative aesthetic. Bodies that exceed the norms of taste and public order represent an alternative, contradictory yet deeply authentic form of expression. Leuci observes them as new metropolitan icons, symbols of an identity in conflict, inhabiting the threshold between fragility and power. Alongside these figures, other liminal presences appear, which, chosen for their marginality, become signs of an existence that claims visibility. Through sculpture, Lucia Leuci reinterprets these details as symbolic devices capable of generating new narratives about the body, the city and desire.
The artist, who has always been attentive to the aesthetics of the everyday and to the construction of the collective imaginary, proposes an exhibition itinerary that invites us to rethink the relationship between public space and subjectivity, between surface and depth, between symbolic order and vital drive. The exhibition is thus configured as a radical and poetic exploration of contemporary forms of living and appearing. Merda e luce is an invitation to look into the formless, to recognize in rejection a potential for revelation, to resignify beauty as an act of resistance.
Photo: Manuel Montesano