Borgo Museo | Casa Paloscia 1975 – 2021
Biography
Lea Monetti comes from Pietro Annigoni’s School of Reality in Florence, attended in the 1970s after taking courses at the Academy of Florence. Hence the importance of drawing for the artist and realism. She is a painter, sculptor, portraitist, expert in ancient techniques and frescoes, she was also an assistant and restorer of the frescoes torn in the studio of the painter and engraver Bruno Saetti in Montepiano. His most recent creations were: Laocoonte Madre for the antiquarian Marco Fabio Apolloni and the re-edition of all his nude sculptures, “coated” for a new bronze casting, commissioned by the interior decorators of the 5G magnate, Mr. Huawei, for the his representative residence in Shenzhen. Currently she has returned to her first love for portraits and industry personalities.
Philosophy
The artist is skilfully master of all techniques, from fresco, to drawing and sculpture. Her figurative art tries to stop and represent the beauty of nature, because as she herself says: “Any form of distortion of reality I feel like violence and I could never knowingly do violence to anything that exists”. Her poetics are therefore clear: “Stop in time the beauty and emotion that things or lights or people arouse in me; everything that excites me. Each subject has its ideal realisation, which is why I have mastered all the techniques”.
Artwork in Castagno
Tommaso Paloscia was the first critic he met, in his first steps on the path of art, and a relationship of mutual esteem was immediately established. The bronze sculpture Ginestra, recently placed (in October 2020), by the will of Simonetta Paloscia, at Casa Paloscia in La Vigna (Castagno), in what has become the Piazzetta delle artiste donne (Women artists’ little square), is extremely realistic, descriptive and harmonious. It was one of the very first that the artist modelled in her career, starting as a Painter of the Annigonniana school, and depicts her daughter Ginestra as a dancer. His manager, Giovambattista Remo Bianco, later pushed the artist to embrace sculpture and bronze which then became the love of his life and the realisation of his most accomplished art and recognised worldwide as one of the main expressions of his figurative art. A little curiosity: in the small church of Castagno there is a seventeenth-century bench donated by the Monetti heirs.