Franco Matticchio
Franco Matticchio was born in Varese in 1957, the city where he still lives and works. He made his debut in 1979 drawing for the culture page of “Corriere della Sera”. Over the years he has produced illustrations for numerous magazines and newspapers, including “Diario”, “Linea d’Ombra”, “Vivimilano” and “Il Sole 24 Ore”, a cover for “The New Yorker” and the 2019 calendar for “Internazionale”. In addition to collaborating with major publishing houses, he also devotes himself to illustration for children. In the field of animation, in 1984 he created the opening credits for Roberto Benigni’s film Il mostro and in 1993 a commercial for Legambiente, which won an award at the Annecy Animation Film Festival. Matticchio is also beloved as a cartoonist: in the 1980s he created Mr. Jones. In 2017, Il signor Ahi e altri guai (Mr. Ouch and Other Trouble), a collection of strips created since the late 1970s, was published by Rizzoli Lizard. His strips, with their unmistakable style and surreal atmospheres, have been collected in several volumes, such as Sogni e disegni (Nuages, 1997) and Esercizi di stilo (Einaudi, 2006) and presented in exhibitions in public and private spaces; over the years he has exhibited continuously at the Nuages gallery in Milan and the Galleria dell’Incisione in Brescia, and in 2017 Galerie Martel in Paris dedicated a solo exhibition to him.