For its 2026 edition, Arte a San Leonardo presents a project by Chiara Camoni, curated by Giovanna Amadasi, conceived specifically for the "greenhouse" space. The work, composed of five elements — three botanical prints on silk and two glazed stoneware sculptures — is designed in direct dialogue with the greenhouse within the Estate. The artist visited San Leonardo in May 2025 and, from the very first encounter, identified two aspects that sparked her interest and resonate with the themes of her research: the variety of the landscape, so rich and diverse as to constitute a world of its own, and the deep bond between the people and the place where they work. These aspects shaped a project that unfolded in several phases. The first, in June 2025, brought together a group of people from San Leonardo for a day of workshop and conviviality led by the artist, giving rise to three silk works that can be considered almost a collective piece. In the second phase, carried out in the studio, Chiara Camoni created two glazed sculptures using elements gathered from the soil of the Estate. For the label of San Leonardo 2021, the chosen image — taken from one of the silks — depicts an anthropomorphic figure made of flowers, leaves, and berries collected at the Estate. The image captures, in emblematic form, the coexistence of vegetal, human and geological elements that define this place.
Artist label by Chiara Camoni for San Leonardo 2021
Chiara Camoni lives and works in the countryside, and her idea of nature stems from the relationship between history, human intervention and culture. Not an idyllic or unspoiled nature, but a place marked by wounds and contradictions, yet capable of generating dialogue and the possibility of mending: a path that reshapes the land and eases the way, a vineyard that makes the soil fertile and sustains an ecosystem.
Nature, labour, conviviality and matter are the main threads of her research — threads she recognised from her very first visit to San Leonardo in May 2025. There she found these elements in the variety of the landscape, in the community that lives and works daily at the Estate, and in the processes of winemaking, precise yet unpredictable.
The theme of labour — artistic and everyday — is central to Camoni's practice. Her works are born in a domestic and shared context, alongside a community of collaborators, where the boundary between private life and work becomes porous. The creative process, collective and open, holds the same importance as the final result.
Equally fundamental is her relationship with matter: earth, plants, fabrics, metal — often gathered from the places of production. Matter is never inert, but alive, listened to and allowed to transform, generating unforeseen outcomes.
From this interweaving comes "Spiritelli (di Terra e Vegetazione)", a work composed of five elements: three botanical prints on silk and two glazed stoneware sculptures, conceived for the greenhouse of Tenuta San Leonardo. The sculptures evoke the subterranean landscape, while the prints — made during a collective workshop — give shape to sylvan figures born from the traces of flowers and leaves, rendering the complex and multiform beauty of the San Leonardo landscape.
Giovanna Amadasi
The artist
Chiara Camoni (Piacenza, 1974) is one of the most significant artists of her generation and in 2026 represents Italy at the 61st Venice Biennale. Her practice is defined by a renewal of sculpture through a conceptual use of ceramics, transcending the boundaries between minor and major arts, pure art and craft, as well as sole authorship, by embracing collaborative workshop practices of co-creation and co-participation. In recent years she has exhibited at many of Italy's leading institutions (including Pirelli Hangar Bicocca, GAM Turin, and the Festival dei due mondi), as well as in prestigious international venues (CAPC, Bordeaux; Manifesta 15 – Barcelona; Bangkok Biennale).
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