In Leonardo Devito's paintings, monsters never truly hide. They slip into the corners of a room, slither along a night sky, populate imaginary architectures that oscillate between the Middle Ages and Gotham City.
Born in Florence in 1997 and now based in Turin, the artist doesn't paint the extraordinary: he depicts what lurks beneath the surface of everyday life, those strange silhouettes that bear an uncanny resemblance to our own. For his exhibition "Scary Monsters" at Hauser & Wirth Paris, organized in collaboration with the Ciaccia Levi gallery, Devito presents a world that blends nonchalance, unease, and an unexpected kind of gentleness.
Violette d'Urso's text, which accompanies the exhibition, offers valuable insight into this work, recounting her fascination with these visible or suggested "monsters" that she finds everywhere in the painter's canvases. They are not there to frighten, but to remind. To remind us of what childhood has left behind: tiny fears, imaginary silhouettes, shadows cast against the walls of a room. Devito manages to paint this sensitive memory with astonishing lightness, as if anxiety could become a game. His urban landscapes evoke both medieval cities and the dark settings of a modern comic strip, creating a mental space where fiction and memory merge.
Devito's strength lies in this ambivalence: his paintings oscillate between gravity and mischief. His visual universe, nourished by multiple references, seems permeated by tensions, dualities, and deliberate contrasts, like the punk chords evoked by the exhibition's title, borrowed from David Bowie's eponymous album. But these tensions are not disturbing; on the contrary, they become a way of taming anxiety, of revealing its poetic aspects, as Violette d'Urso points out: "Paradoxically, this world is reassuring: in Devito's work, the frightening is also poetic."
The artist is only 28 years old, but his career already demonstrates surprising maturity. Trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, then at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, he obtained his Master of Fine Arts degree from the Accademia Albertina in Turin. His recent solo exhibitions – “Teatrino” in Paris in 2024, “Candide” alongside Domenico Gnoli in Milan in 2024-2025, and a solo project presented at Liste Art Fair Basel in 2025 – showcase a constantly evolving body of work, attracting both curators and collectors drawn to this blend of erudition and imagination.
The framework of the “Hauser & Wirth Invite(s)” program reinforces this interpretation. Designed to host artists, galleries, and writers, it offers a platform to those whose voices deserve a wider audience. Devito’s selection reflects this desire to build bridges, to highlight emerging practices, and to foster artistic dialogue within the Parisian scene. The artist naturally finds his place within this context: his work, imbued with fragmented narratives, mental images, and contemporary mythologies, invites a multifaceted, fluid, almost cinematic reading.
Ultimately, what Devito presents isn't a fantastical bestiary: it's an inner cartography, populated by tamed fears, familiar shadows, and stories we carry without always recognizing them. His monsters aren't there to haunt us; they're there to accompany us, like those discreet presences we eventually glimpse in the corner of a mirror or in the recesses of a dream. With "Scary Monsters," Leonardo Devito invites us not so much to contemplate the unknown as to acknowledge it, to accept that strangeness is part of our inner landscape.
"Scary Monsters"
Hauser & Wirth Paris
26 bis, rue François-1er, Paris 8e
