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  Patagonia

  Lorenzo Mattotti

  € 35,00 € 28,00

  “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 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 Both notebooks are unpublished and were made between 2003 and 2004.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

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  Donne – Women

  Franco Matticchio

  € 23,00 € 18,40

  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

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  La settimana bianca

  Emi Ligabue

  € 24,00 € 19,20

  Since the beginning of her career as a visual artist in the early 1980s, Emi Ligabue has focused her research on everyday objects, from everyday utensils to the icons of modernity and design, first creating sculptures and installations and then two-dimensional works, preferring the technique of collage. Taking and recontextualising images is his signature style and has allowed the artist to freely experiment with mixing genres, and to reflect on the increasingly blurred boundaries between visual and applied arts.

  In the 65 collages of La settimana bianca (The White Week), the title of the exhibition curated by Melania Gazzotti at the Mutty cultural centre and its catalogue, Emi Ligabue measures himself against a different visual imagery: the mountain, as a relatively recent holiday and winter sports destination. This time, therefore, the subject of investigation is no longer the artefact itself, but rather the visual ensemble of snow-covered peaks, skis, snowshoes and plastic poses, placed within a collective phenomenon of custom – which began in the 1960s and is now consolidated – that thanks to artistic elaboration and interpretation becomes evocation and takes on an iconic perspective, anything but free of irony and provocation, as is the artist’s custom.

  A book for lovers of illustration, graphics and design and, of course, for die-hard winter mountain-goers.

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  Edited by Melania Gazzotti
  Texts by Melania Gazzotti
  Book design by Bunker

  21 × 28 cm
  68 pages
  Sewing stitch Singer
  Italian
  Isbn 978-88-98030-14-9
  First published January 2019

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  Dandelion

  Elisa Talentino

  € 23,00 € 18,40

  In 2016, Elisa Talentino, an internationally renowned illustrator who lives and works in Turin, spent a month between the Hautes-Alpes department and the province of Cuneo thanks to the Borderscapes artist residency, visiting villages and valleys on the border between Italy and France and immersing herself in Occitan culture. The ancient dances of those places became the subject of his research, which led in 2017 to the creation of the animation Dandelion.

  The artist paints more than a thousand watercolour plates that are then assembled to bring to life two dancers who, as in a courtship ritual, approach, move apart and brush against each other to the notes of a two-step bourrée, specially written by cellist Julia Kent and inspired by traditional Occitan music. The only element appearing between the two dancing bodies is a simple and common flower: the dandelion or dandelion (in English Dandelion deriving from the French Dent-de-lion); popular tradition has it that scattering the seeds of this plant, contained in a dandelion, in the air can make a wish for love come true.

  An evocative and poetic animation, which strikes La Fabbrica dei Suoni and Espaci Occitan, who undertake the installation of the exhibition “Tempo di bourrée”. Some drawings and sketches made by Elisa Talentino for the animation have been collected in this delightful volume, edited by Melania Gazzotti and embellished with a numbered print signed by the artist.

  The animation Dandelion has been selected in animation festivals worldwide, winning the Gold Medal of “3×3 Magazine”. The soundtrack was recognised as Best original soundtrack at the Lago Film Fest and Wag Film Festival.

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  Edited by Melania Gazzotti
  Texts by Melania Gazzotti and Rosella Pellerino
  Book design Bunker

  13,5 × 19 cm
  80 pages
  Swiss-style hardback
  Italian/Occitan
  Contains a risograph print
  numbered and signed by the artist
  Isbn 978-88-98030-15-6
  First published July 2018

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