My passion for design dates back to my childhood … I was always drawing secretly, even when I was not drawing, I looked at the world as if I was drawing it. Amedeo Modigliani said: “the art of design should never perish, its end would mean the end of art itself”. This is my inspiration and this is what I have always kept in my heart as an artist.

As far back as I can remember, I used design as a way of explaining everything that I encountered in the world to myself. Drawing was effortless and it was of vital importance to me as I navigated through the tender ages of my young life; as I observed, stopping here or there. I reconfirmed what I had discovered with a black line scratched on a thin piece of paper.

It all started one day when I picked a flower in a garden. I placed the flower gently in the palm of my left hand and carefully examined it. There before me, in that moment, I beheld the most beautiful design that I could ever wish to see.

It was perfect. There, in an instant, before the beauty of this freshly picked flower, I was profoundly touched and my life’s vocation was born.

As I walk through life and sometimes encounter cruelty, the wounds I have received on occasion, forces me to continually seek the beauty that I encountered on that fateful and life changing day.

Over the years, I realized that the flower had a face, the same face that had also generated that perfect and fragile flower.

That is the face that I am always searching for tirelessly.

Lara Leonardi

Listening to music, for me, is like feeling inside, like the sound of thunder that breaks everything, such as black on white that scratches everything, is a journey of knowledge to the place from which everything arises.
I have been allowed to meet people like Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin, Dvořak, Schubert, who have shown themselves through their work and who are speaking about me. All the music that comes from their songs collides with my life, while I paint, they speak to me consistently and they do not leave me in peace. The message they are shouting to me becomes more and more familiar; their screams, their thirst for happiness, becomes my thirst, my cry.
An unbreakable bond of friendship has been created with these artists: the pictures are born immersed in music as if in a bath of water, where everything is part of creating a relationship with the infinite.

Lara Leonardi

La ricerca della forma mi ha condotto a "guardare" il mio corpo che, concepito come terra viva, si è lasciato plasmare dalle mie mani da disegnatrice sporche di carbone. Nascono le visioni sulla mia nudità che mostra eroticamente la carne. La carne che ci dà la forma. Occorre essere abili, poeti pazzi, amanti del silenzio e del rischio.
Credo di essere una cucitrice di membra, da parte a parte, per vedere che cosa vi è dentro.
Le fotografie dei miei nudi, che accompagnano il lavoro pittorico, sono la testimonianza di performances in atto vissute in solitaria meditazione.

Lara Leonardi