Description
Lorenzo Mattotti is, undoubtedly, an Italian illustrator and cartoonist of great international importance.
Tricromia has been collaborating with the artist for years now, both hosting exhibitions of his works and accompanying the publication of some of his books, mainly in black and white. In fact, our predilection for his works on paper in black and white, whether it is to exhibit them or to edit them, derives from the strength that comes from the few lights that come out of the dark through the contrasts; this is the India black challenge: a story in which shadows come to life.
The dream journey of 2006, entitled At the end of the night , for which the poetics of the works has been fixed in an edition of the same title, is a succession of tables depicting a man, a bed, a plunge into the night. A man with a bent back in the act and pose of tying his shoes has the feeling that, behind him, the bed on which he was sitting had widened, enlarged. That it had become huge: a plain, a sea, a color; a vast surface capable of enclosing the entire night that he has just spent, with all the dreams, nightmares and, indeed, the mysteries.
Notes on the landscape is also a publication that collects the works exhibited in the exhibition of the same name, published by Tricromia in 2008. A book in black and white, printed in four colors with a silkscreen cover, which fixes once again the beauty of its intense and visionary inks.
« I loved looking at landscape paintings. Starting with Friedrich, passing through the itinerant people, I have always had a bit of fear of facing the landscape as a subject. I have always designed places that were related to the characters and the story I was telling. Only during my trip to Patagonia did I ask myself the problem of how to translate the emotions I experienced in relation to that space and afterwards the desire to draw other landscapes became more and more pressing.
Observing a valley, a curve, a bump, tree, shadow, river or coast often gives me a “musical” emotion, a sort of feeling of the landscape. What is this feeling really built from? What I wanted to fix was a space reinterpreted by my gaze; it was the lines, the curves, the valleys and the shadows that passed before my eyes. It was the melodies that had to be drawn. It was those distortions, the stretches, the rhythmic spots that I had to try to learn to paint. Learn an alphabet of curves, against curves, spots, lines, thick, thin, dashed strokes, which allowed me to represent all emotions on paper.
I had to translate all that musicality-harmony of forms through a personal Solfeggio-Alphabet. I believe, now, that we can speak of a “landscape in motion” where the movement is that of the eye in the landscape. And so I would call it “solfeggio of the gaze or melodies for the eyes”.
They are not existing landscapes but transpositions of memories lived by looking at real landscapes mixed with memory and digested with the play of the imagination. After Patagonia, these drawings relate to other memories of other landscapes ranging from the French countryside to the Tuscan coast, from Balinese landscapes to the coasts of Australia. The black and white with the brush forced me to an extreme synthesis and a great spontaneity in the creation of shapes and spaces, which allowed me not to get lost in other evocations and to look for a very simplified alphabet of representation “.
Lorenzo Mattotti’s debut took place in the late seventies as a comic book author; in the early 1980s he was co-founder, with other designers, of the Valvoline Group. In 1984 he created Fuochi which, welcomed as an event in the world of comics, has won important international awards. With Incidenti, Signor Spartaco, Doctor Nefasto, The man at the window and many other illustrated books, up to Stigmata, Mattotti’s work has evolved according to a constant of great consistency, but in the eclectic sign of those who always choose to try themselves in the new .
By the author, Tricromia has also published The ghost in the room (2002) and The room (2004).
The exhibition Bacinema dates back to 2010, conceived and curated by Tiziana Cino, which has the kiss in cinema as its visionary theme. Among the numerous artists, Mattotti participated in it illustrating In the Mood for Love , a 2000 film with Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung, directed by Won Kar-wai. The book of the same name, published by Tricrimia, uses the preface by Vincenzo Mollica and Ferruccio Giromini.
