The project of the Floriano Bodini Civic Museum dedicated to Existential Realism and New Figuration continues with this initiative. The exhibition “Piero Leddi. Painting is a risky beginning ", to which will also be added the volume of the same title edited by Mariachiara Fugazza for the series" Archives of New Figuration "edited by Sara Bodini and Luca Pietro Nicoletti, focuses on the youth path of Leddi culminated in the solo shows of the late 1950s. Originally from Alessandria and moved to Milan, in connection with his peers from Brera including Floriano Bodini, to whom a deep friendship binds him, Leddi started in the decade an "autobiography of the forms sought", to use one of his expressions, a long career arrived in the 2000s. This first chapter reflects a significant moment of an individual and collective itinerary: a narration through images that gives us back the vitality of a research open to renewal and at the same time committed to exploring and defending the possibilities and reasons for painting.

The exhibition brings together works produced by Piero Leddi in the phase that merged into two exhibitions in 1958 and 1959. The dialectic between the original environment and urban modernity, the experimentation of a language suitable for artistically interpreting the transformations underway emerge clearly in the proposed works, where you can see animals and agricultural tools and at the same time elements of the city, cars, tram interiors.

The 1959 presentation by Mario De Micheli, who has continuously followed Leddi's activity, underlines the autobiographical ideas of a young man who, having arrived in Milan from the Tortona area, «relives in himself the sense of a typical exodus of our days , and there is a trace of this in his sheets and in his canvases, with what is poetic, nostalgic, restless and pitiless also can be born in a story like this ».

At the same time, the above already highlights the typical traits of the artist. De Micheli further notes: «Looking at Leddi's paintings and drawings, one realizes the various reasons that guide his expressive research. Sometimes the sign becomes dry, dry, almost resentful; sometimes soft; in one painting the brushstroke acquires an expressionist accent, in another it is cautious, measured. Leddi is filtering his feelings, testing them. And this fervor, this intense questioning, is the guarantee of his commitment, of his passion for a painting of which man is measure and substance ».