Gianluigi Toccafondo
Born in San Marino in 1965, after studying in Urbino in 1987 he moved to Milan. In 1989, he made his first short film, La coda, with Mixfilm. From the outset, he showed a special ability to make cinematographic language dialogue with pictorial language, using archive material on which he intervened directly with drawing or acrylic painting. This technique is also present in his subsequent films: La pista (1991), Le Criminel (1993), Pinocchio (1999), Essere morti o essere vivi è la stessa cosa (2000), La piccola Russia (2003) and Briganti senza leggenda (2012). In addition to short films, there are also animations: for television, the theme songs for the 56th Venice Film Festival (1999) and several RAI programmes; for advertising, Levi’s Jeans (1993) and Sambuca Molinari (1995); for cinema, including the theme song for the production company Fandango (1998) and the titles of Ridley Scott’s film Robin Hood (2010). In addition to collaborations in video production, including assistant director on Garrone’s film Gomorra (2007), Toccafondo also works in publishing. In addition to Fandango, with which he has worked since 1998 for almost ten years, he has designed for Einaudi, Mondadori, Little More, Giunti, Pulcinoelefante, Salani and Feltrinelli. Since 2014, he has collaborated with the Teatro dell’Opera in Rome. In 2018, he held a large anthological exhibition at the Galleria Civica in Modena.
€ 24,00Melodramma collects a selection of unpublished illustrations created by painter and illustrator Gianluigi Toccafondo for the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma. The artist has been collaborating since 2014 with the prestigious Roman theatre for which he has created all the posters for the last five opera and ballet seasons, as well as sets and costumes for operatic masterpieces such as Il barbiere di Siviglia, Don Giovanni and Rigoletto.
Toccafondo approached theatre at the height of a brilliant career as an illustrator in publishing and as the author of short films and animation works, commissioned by television and cinema. Toccafondo brings his incredible ability to create moving images, making cinematographic language dialogue with pictorial language, also to the theatre by introducing animation projections among the elements of his sets.
Melodramma brings together a rich selection of panels that, thanks to the artist’s masterful ability to synthesise forms and expressive use of colour, shows all his dreamlike power. With a text by Carlo Fuortes, Superintendent of the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma.
Curated by Melania Gazzotti, a project by Associazione Flangini with the patronage and collaboration of the Department of Culture of the Municipality of Mantua. On show at the Casa di Rigoletto from 8 September to 3 October 2020.
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Curated by Melania Gazzotti
Texts by Melania Gazzotti and Carlo Fuortes
Book design by Bunker13.5 × 19 cm
80 pages
Hardback
Italian
Isbn 978-88-98030-34-7
First published September 2020
