LEO ORTA TERRA ETNA: SCULPTURES
4 April - 10 June 2025 Galleria SARP
SARP Artists Residency & Gallery is pleased to present Leo Orta Sculptures, a new collection of sculptures and paintings inspired by the concept of erosion. The exhibition showcases eight sculptures of several sizes, techniques and materials and four sculptural paintings.
The artist’s journey through the volcanic landscape is not just a study of geology but an immersion into an emotional space: a room where time, destruction, and regeneration exist simultaneously. The experience of standing at the mountain’s peak, the silence of nature in witnessing basalt darken under shifting light is important in the abstraction of landscape. He observes how the fauna and flora adapts to reclaiming the ash-covered land with this becoming a threshold into something beyond mere observation. What we can not observe, it is in the sound of the mountain that we experience the ever present natural force beneath the earth.
To cohabit in an unstable climate is to embody resilience. The local habitat has adapted to the unpredictability of the terrain, the shifting weight of stone and ash, the interruptions of fire and silence. Their presence is not incidental but rather part of an ongoing search to follow traces, to sense movement in the cracks of a cave or the stillness of a plateau, to witness life emerging from what appears barren.
The idea of fertility emanates from this landscape, not in abundance, but in the way things take shape from what is left behind. Orta’s sculptures reflect this process. They are sedimentations, accumulations of time and material bodies shaped by the very land that surrounds them. Using cellulose, basalt, and found organic fragments, the artist gives form to beings that seem half-born from the terrain itself, neither fully fossilised nor fully alive. In this act of transformation, his living beings embody the tension between permanence and dissolution, between erosion and renewal.
Beyond the act of sculpting, Orta wishes to recreate the silent confrontation between sculpture and viewer, an encounter in which two beings, unfamiliar to each other, share a moment of recognition without the act of domestication.
There is both fear and acceptance in this ephemeral cohabitation, Orta’s artistic practice is a quiet negotiation between presence and survival.
Text by Studio Orta, edited by SARP Artist Residency Team.