It’s a title made of words. For me Alice is Giuseppina. Living is what you’ve been doing for 30 years trying to find a place for yourself and your artists. Professional people of dreams and drawings like Ahmed and Samuel. Still is an adverb. It indicates that an action or fact are not concluded, but continue, persist in the present. It is written on the dictionary. Here is the utopia.
Ascanio Celestini
Tricromia hosts the exhibition ” Alice abita ancora qui “by Samuele Canestrari and Ahmed Ben Nessib , two talented young illustrators.
Both have chosen to reread the fairy tale of Alice to masculine, a completely new perspective and absolutely innovative: a disruptive break with gender conventions.
The illustrations thus offer an original vision of the story of Alice to which they allude iconographically with metropolitan quotations and poetic illusions, but which they interpret in a completely personal way.
The oneiric dimension remains in search of the wonder typical of the novel to which they are inspired, but the roots are always well fixed in the domestic dimension.
Those artistic foundations that Tricromia has provided for the illustrators she has been exhibiting and promoting for three decades.
Ben Nessib and Canestrari have chosen to reread the tale of Alice masculine, a completely new and absolutely innovative perspective: a disruptive break with gender conventions.
The illustrations thus offer a completely original view of Alice’s story to which they allude iconographically with metropolitan quotations and poetic illusions, but which they interpret in a completely personal way.
The oneiric dimension remains in search of the wonder typical of the novel to which they are inspired, but the roots are always well fixed in the domestic dimension. Those artistic foundations that Tricromia has provided for the illustrators she has been exhibiting and promoting for three decades.
The continuous references to the rabbit in the tables of Canestrari endow the boy drawn ears that recall what in Alice is the narrative gimmick that triggers the dream adventure: the Bianrabbit.
then the doors, which metaphorically indicate the crossing, the border between reality and dream but also the domestic dimension, the bond always evoked with the walls of Tricromia. “The only possibility is to live here. The space around is occupied by your strange presence”: the dreamlike dimension to which Canestrari alludes is also manifested with the blindfold on the eyes of the human figure he has chosen to represent.
“I don’t know where Alice lives, but if she is as I see her then I think I can accommodate her”: the house is also at the center of the male Alice by Ben Nessib
who designs armchairs, tables with flowers, a carpet, a door but also flames, domestic plants, cars and a man with a mask: the size of the dream is forced to deal with reality.
Alice abita ancora qui, the new editorial adventure of Tricromia: a volume designed to celebrate its thirtieth year of activity and to symbolically pay homage to all the artists who have “inhabited” the gallery in Rome with their works independently of the physical location, which has now taken on the more intimate dimension of a Home Gallery in a private home, that of the director Giuseppina Frassino.
Giuseppina Frassino asked both artists to work on the imagery proposed by Lewis Carrol’s novel Alice in Wonderland through a thread that could link the Tricromia gallery to the two artists and to all those who have worked there. The choice of the artists, born in 1992 and 1996, is not random: their young age confirms the gallery’s tradition of promoting emerging talents. Thirty years of fervent work to discover illustrators and artists who have drawn and painted their visions and inner worlds on the walls of Tricromia.
artThe design, created by Sara Verdone, is innovative and refined in its genre. Created in the unusual 29×29 cm leporello format with a double cover, printed in intense black and white, Alice still lives here presents ten drawings by each of the two authors: two parallel stories that can be read in as many different directions. The continuity of the paper runs from one cover to the other and the joints become a graphic element, transforming a technical requirement into an element that dialogues at the same time with the drawings and the texts.
FOR THE EXCLUSIVE PURCHASE OF THE 10 PLATES BY SAMUELE CANESTRARI OR AHMED BEN NESSIB PLEASE CONTACT THE GALLERY
INFO@TRICROMIA.COM
Samuele Canestrari was born in Fano in 1996 and is an illustrator. In 2017 he received the Scuola del Libro award at Animavì – International Festival of Poetic Animation Cinema in Pergola. He has collaborated with: Internazionale, Gagarin cultural orbits, This Is Not A Love Song, Destroy Brandina, Malamente, Progetto Metastasi and Cavallino Rivista (2017). His exhibitions include: “La linea d’ombra”, Corte Zavattini 31, Cesena 2018, “Mosto e caviglie” ,Odeon Gallery, Bologna 2019. “An overwhelming smell of soil” in 2020 at Chrysalid Gallery, Rotterdam, a gallery by which he is represented. With Libri Somari, the publishing project he founded together with Ahmed Ben Nessib, a young illustrator and director of short films, awarded in France and Italy, he published in 2018 Gli uominicane non hanno la coda and in 2019 Mosto, Libri Somari and MalEdizioni. Other publications are This is not La dolce vita TINALS 2020 and Il Battesimo del porco MalEdizioni 2020.
He collaborates with Tricromia Illustator’s International Art Gallery (Rome) where his first exhibitions “Gli uominicane non hanno la coda”, 2019 and “Il battesimo del porco” in 2020 were presented.
In 2021, together with Ahmed Ben Nessib he published Alice abita ancora qui – t/19, for the Tricromia editions edited by Giuseppina Frassino with a text by Ascanio Celestini accompanying the homonymous exhibition.
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Ahmed Ben Nessib was born in Tunis in 1992 and is a cartoonist and director of short animated films. His drawings have been published in several newspapers and magazines including “Internazionale”, “Lo straniero” and “Cavallino Rivista” of which he is co-founder.
He studied animation at the EMCA in Angoulême and at the book school in Urbino.
His first short film EKART was published in volume 5 of Dvd Animazioni, Cortometraggi Italiani Contemporanei, and won awards in France and Italy. “Ekart” (animated drawing, charcoal on paper) is very introspective and is the simple reflection of a girl who, in a flooded house, observes the glass and transfigures her gaze. With Libri Somari, the publishing house he founded together with Samuele Canestrari, a young illustrator and director from Fano who has already won several awards, he published “Ekart/la tecnica del nuotatore”, his first comic book, and “L’assassino è sempre più confuso”.
He collaborates with Tricromia Illustator’s International Art Gallery (Rome) where in 2019 his first two exhibitions “L’assassino è sempre più confuso” and “Ekart/la tecnica del nuotatore” were presented. In 2020, again at Tricromia, he exhibited the drawing created for “Open art week”, the Italian/Tunisian festival on the theme “Nouvelle Frontiäre”, a project that saw the participation of Lab 619 (a Tunisian comics collective) and a group of twelve Italian comic book artists. The works were exhibited in both Tunis and Perugia and then posted in the subways of both cities.
In 2021, together with Samuele Canestrari he published Alice abita ancora qui – t/19, for the Tricromia editions edited by Giuseppina Frassino with a text by Ascanio Celestini accompanying the exhibition of the same name.
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Past exhibitions
About Exhibitions
Following Exhibitions means discovering a new way of collecting, opening up one’s knowledge to the most original forms of storytelling through images by giving oneself a fantastic immersion in the styles and sensibilities of routes through the work of recognised talents and opening up to all contemporary expressive techniques.
Illustrators and urban artists, photographers, web-artists and 3D designers with a sought-after number of works in the Exhibitions virtual gallery will alternate periodically.
Exhibitions collection enters the art market with a modern and sustainable key to favour access to a new type of collecting with proposals outside the channels of the great art market, with a minimum investment and favouring the passion of those who want to enrich, appointment after appointment, their knowledge of the most original forms of storytelling through images.
Since 1990 Tricromia has been discovering, promoting and hosting illustrators and designers, artists and sculptors with a love for the “simple” art of drawing and also with a playful spirit (this is art too). It is not satisfied with the evanescence of an exhibition and takes care to stop the movement of those colours that come and go, that periodically settle on the white walls of the gallery and then fly elsewhere. Tricromia also becomes an art publisher. Together with the artists it decides to “fix” the beauty of those drawings in a publication.