Lorenzo Mattotti
Mattotti made his debut in the late 1970s as a comic book author and in the early 1980s he founded the Valvoline group with other illustrators. In 1984 he produced Fuochi, which was received as an event in the world of comics and won major international awards. He later published numerous comics, graphic novels and illustrated books, with various publishers: Coconino, Dolce Vita, Einaudi, Feltrinelli, Gallucci, Granata, Hazard, L’isola trovata, Logos, Louis Vuitton, Milano Libri, Nuages, Ottaviano. Today, his books are translated all over the world. He publishes in newspapers and magazines such as “The New Yorker”, “Le Monde”, “Das Magazin”, “Suddeutsche Zeitung”, “Nouvel Observateur”, “Corriere della Sera” and “la Repubblica”. His personal exhibitions have been numerous, including anthological exhibitions at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, the Frans Hals museum in Haarlem, and the Musei di Porta Romana. His latest works include the publications Covers for the New Yorker and Ghirlanda for Logos and, in October 2019, the film presented at Cannes La famosa invasione degli orsi in Sicilia, based on the novel of the same name by Dino Buzzati. He lives and works in Paris.
€ 30,00Lorenzo Mattotti, an internationally renowned illustrator, much loved by the public, has always looked to the seventh art as an inexhaustible source of inspiration.
This book, produced on the occasion of the 2021 edition of the Festival International du Film de La Roche-sur-Yon, which has dedicated an unprecedented exhibition to the artist, aims to highlight the double thread that links Mattotti’s work to cinema. This double thread has led him over the years to design the posters of films and major film festivals, until signing in 2019 the highly successful animated feature film The Famous Invasion of the Bears in Sicily, which was presented at the Cannes Film Festival.
The volume is divided into four sections: Film festival posters, from the image of numerous festivals in the 1990s, to the prestigious commission for Cannes, to the Venice Film Festival; Editorial illustrations, commissioned by “The New Yorker” during its long collaboration with the famous American magazine; Film posters, including Eros, for which he drew the poetic interludes that open the three episodes directed by Wong Kar-wai, Michelangelo Antonioni and Steven Soderbergh; and finally, animated films, from the very first Bluebeard, through Pinocchio to the aforementioned The Famous Invasion of the Bears in Sicily, accompanied by unpublished sketches and storyboards.
The volume concludes with a long and impassioned interview with Lorenzo Mattotti by the Festival’s artistic director Charlotte Serrand, who traces the stages of his journey into the seventh art, which began in his great-uncle’s cinema, Cinema Mattotti.
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Edited by Melania Gazzotti
With the collaboration of Charlotte Serrand
Illustrations by Lorenzo Mattotti
Texts by Melania Gazzotti, Charlotte Serrand, Maximilien Schnel
Book design by Bunker19.5 × 26 cm
112 pages
Hardback
French/Italian
Isbn 978-88-98030-43-9
First published October 2021
€ 35,00“It was a kind of music. Six months later I found an album of oriental paper, and I started to draw a kind of landscape score. I tried to find this music of forms, I looked for my Patagonia from the Patagonia I had crossed”.
– Lorenzo MattottiThis is not the first time that Mattotti has felt the need to make an illustrated travelogue, he had already done so in 2014, collecting a series of drawings documenting his discovery of Vietnam in a precious travel book, later published by Louis Vuitton. On Patagonia, however, the artist does not want to make a full-fledged reportage, as he had done for the eastern country; what interests him about this place is only one aspect: its boundless and virgin nature, not its inhabitants and their stories that had so fascinated storytellers such as Bruce Chatwin and Louis Sepulveda. For Mattotti, Patagonia is first and foremost a place of the mind and that is why he strips it of colour to represent it, synthesising its forms, making it almost abstract to succeed in giving us back a sensation before an image, the sensation that every man feels when he finds himself in an extreme land, in a land at the end of the world.
Edited by Melania Gazzotti, the book presents all the 24 black and white plates contained in the Nepalese paper notebook where Mattotti copied his travel notes, together with a selection of colour drawings made by the artist in a classic Moleskine® notebook while he was in Patagonia. Both notebooks are unpublished and were made between 2003 and 2004.
The world’s best-known Italian illustrator, a never-before-seen exhibition and a book to collect: Patagonia by Lorenzo Mattotti promises to be a not-to-be-missed event for all lovers of contemporary illustration and beyond.
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Edited by Melania Gazzotti
Texts by Lorenzo Mattotti, Melania Gazzotti, Jorge Zentner
Book design by Bunker28 × 15 cm
116 pages
Swiss-style hardback
Italian/English/French/Spanish
Isbn 978-88-98030-28-6
First published October 2020
