Illustration

Why Pino Tovaglia kept this unpublished work, or what its true genesis is, we will never know. The fact is that his daughter Irene, getting her hands on her father’s materials, found these 24 plates, held together with tape, with an intriguing cover where the Pirelli logo stands out, front and back. The mystery deepens because the managers of the famous brand claim that there is no trace of such a project in their archives; even during the years of the collaboration between the designer and the multinational company nothing leads back to this pamphlet, which appears to be a real prototype.

Whatever its origin, it is in any case an interesting and singular study of the elongated form, which Tovaglia evidently enjoys doing of his own free will. The association with the brand, as far as we can surmise, probably arises by analogy with the content, or vice versa.

The 56 pages of A story as long as are thus a valuable exercise in style, reproposed in its formal integrity, but adapted for a contemporary publication, accompanied by a short text by Marta Sironi, which allows us to investigate and enhance the more human side of one of the most significant figures of Italian graphic design in the second half of the twentieth century. 

Dedicated to fans of graphic design, illustration and simple admirers of a great protagonist who spontaneously addresses children, with a hint of mystery…

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Illustrations by Pino Tovaglia
Text by Marta Sironi
Cover by Flavia Ruotolo
Book design Bunker and Flavia Ruotolo

21 × 12 cm
56 pages
Paperback with dust jacket
Italian
Isbn 978-88-98030-54-5
First edition November 2022

There are places that exist only in memory, some of them so bizarre that they seem instead to be the figment of a child’s imagination-or perhaps an artist’s or even a designer’s. This is not the case with The Shops of Aoi Huber Kono: the meticulously illustrated facades in this leporello, which Aoi began composing in 1974, correspond to places that did indeed exist, everyday and familiar places. 

If we are all accustomed to going to the bakery or the fish market, what happened instead to the confectionery, the dairy, the milliner or the haberdashery? Perhaps someday we will tell our children, as if it were a legend, that toys were not always crammed into the aisles of a shopping mall but that there were stores in which to spend hours looking at them all, magical places to be taken to after being at the doctor’s, or grandparents in secret. Or that once upon a time, when the world was a little less interconnected and much more diverse, there were no places in which to find everything from celery to tires: there were stores. 

In this book, whose plates were designed for a small volume in the Tantibambini series, edited by Bruno Munari for Einaudi, Aoi Huber Kono illustrates the facades of 16 stores, making a summary of the most characteristic features of each: some still exist, but who can say for how long?

The title on the cover is a small jewel of design and graphics, the result of the intense collaboration between husband and wife: Max Huber made the curtain strips with colored cutouts and composed the lettering, Aoi embellished it with a punctuated hemming.

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Illustrations by Aoi Huber Kono
Book design Bunker

23 × 16 cm
16 pages
Leporello with jacket
Italian
Isbn 978-88-98030-51-4
First published July 2022

The result of 6 years of work, Il bacio della lucertola (The Lizard’s Kiss) is the graphic novel with which Luca Zamoc debuts in the publishing world. The story stems from an intense journey of Zamoc in 2013 through the Thai jungle and creeps into the mind and pen of the author until it becomes today a masterpiece of 96 pages, redrawn three times before arriving at the final form. Everything starts from an accident in the Indonesian jungle: the dramatic fate of the protagonist and his companion will be the pretext for deep existential and spiritual reflections, while in the background reality dialogues with fantasy, opening to the reader imaginative, primordial and visionary scenarios.

Also in this case it is possible to find the stylistic code of the authors, who are distinguished by the investigation on the relationship between Man, Nature and Mythology. A journey of exploration in an inhospitable and wild place, in which, however, coexist, together with archaeological traces and tropical fauna, singular spiritual connotations. It is in this way that, at the crossroads between nature and culture, the journey through the forest becomes a profound inner journey. The passages are marked by continuous flashbacks full of tension and surprise, where past and present, escape and search, inexorably mix, pushing the protagonist to look for answers on the border between the environment that surrounds him and his interiority. The figurative complex, here rendered with ink drawings, manages to immerse and involve the reader in the shamanic and mysterious atmosphere.

Aimed at admirers of graphic novels and comics, to discover a new authoritative protagonist.

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Illustrations by Luca Zamoc
Texts by Luca Speranzoni
Cover title Luca Barcellona
Calligraphy Lorenzo Bolzoni
Book design Bunker

20,5 × 29 cm
96 pages
Paperback
Italian
Isbn 978-88-98030-42-2
First published October 2021

The effect of fireworks at the moment of explosion seems impossible to reproduce on paper, due to its ephemeral and iridescent nature. Yet in late 19th century Japan, Jinta Hirayama undertook this challenge by publishing an extraordinary catalogue.

While the purpose of the booklet was once to show Hirayama Fireworks Company’s customers the variety and originality of its pyrotechnic productions, complete with instructions for use, today the illustrated fireworks catalogue stands before our eyes as a valuable work of graphic art. 86 magnetic illustrations, geometric and elegant, rigorous and striking, that manage to evoke the brilliance and magnificence of the fireworks as they appear at night and constitute the restored reproduction of the original catalogue, dated 1883.

It was precisely in those years that Hirayama’s company distinguished itself in the production of fireworks, making notable technical innovations that culminated in a new expressive horizon: from the exclusive use of orange hues, it moved on to a riot of colours.

As well as being a source of inspiration, the singular illustrations intrigue the beholder with ever-changing combinations, and lead right back to the Japanese etymology of the term: page after page one seems to see ‘flowers of fire’ (in Japanese, hanabi). An unusual and original book, with the unmistakable flavour of yesteryear of an art that has never gone out of fashion.

With a precious childhood memory by Aoi Huber Kono, and lettering on the cover by Luca Barcellona.

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With a text by Aoi Huber Kono
Cover lettering by Luca Barcellona
Book design by Bunker

12 × 18 cm
96 pages
Paperback + dust jacket
Italian
Isbn 978-88-98030-40-8
First published July 2021

“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 Mattotti

This 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 Bunker

28 × 15 cm
116 pages
Swiss-style hardback
Italian/English/French/Spanish
Isbn 978-88-98030-28-6
First published October 2020

Melodramma 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 Bunker

13.5 × 19 cm
80 pages
Hardback
Italian
Isbn 978-88-98030-34-7
First published September 2020

Franco Matticchio’s women’s faces are serious and enigmatic, he draws them out of the blue on every piece of paper he comes across, from a letter envelope to the page of a book or the “The New Yorker”.

They are the faces he encounters on the street, at the station, that he observes in his daily life and that accumulate and overlap in his personal visual imagination. Matticchio’s attention is captured by women of inconspicuous beauty, whose impassive expressions are united by a certain intensity and pride in their gaze. Over the years, the illustrator has continued to return to this inexhaustible subject, using every medium: pastels, watercolours, acrylics or even simply an Indian ink pen or pencil, always placing these figures against neutral backgrounds or in bare environments without temporal references, succeeding in subtraction to heighten the intimacy of the scenes and create suspended and rarefied atmospheres.

Over time, Matticchio has amassed a veritable collection of female faces, almost never made on commission and mostly unpublished: a conspicuous body of drawings in which one can find the unmistakable style of the illustrator but at the same time find it hard to recognise that surreal and ironic vein that is one of his main distinguishing features. In fact, when Matticchio finds himself drawing a woman’s face, he only acts as a fascinated and discreet observer of the profound and mysterious complexity of the female soul.

The book, edited by Melania Gazzotti, is accompanied by an unpublished text by Ugo Cornia.

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Edited by Melania Gazzotti
Texts by Ugo Cornia, Melania Gazzotti and Rosanna Padrini Dolcini
Book design by Bunker

13.5 × 19 cm
80 pages
Hardback
Italian/English
Isbn 978-88-98030-21-7
First published July 2019