The fragility and sweetness of first love

Lorenzo Mattotti's room is an indefinite space, devoid of precise references, where details such as the headboard of a bed, a pillow, a rectangle that could be a picture or a window. The room could be in any place, at any time, and we can only see a narrow portion of it, the one immediately surrounding the bodies of two lovers lying in a frame perfectly framed by the horizontal format of the notebook pages. Abstract space that marks the perimeter of their love, defines and protects it, the room is a refuge that separates the two lovers from reality, perhaps from their own life, suspending them in a timeless dimension in which there is only one for each other. other, immersed in an atmosphere saturated with sweetness and desire.
Page after page, we relive the magical moments spent with our first love, those dedicated to mutual exploration, when the desire and fear of discovering and being discovered they mix with the intoxicating sensation of freedom in being able to finally get naked. The hours spent on the bed follow one another, discussing, looking at each other, touching each other, letting oneself go to perfumes and sensations. And we pretend to argue, we joke, then we fall asleep, we kiss. She trembles. And she tries to understand what the other thinks, weighing his every word, every gesture of him: the eye that looks at you, a smile, the back turned, the hand that slowly glides on the skin. It is the grammar of love, which Mattotti sketches with quick touches now clear and decisive, playing with chiaroscuro, now more subtle to simulate light effects, giving life to a notebook to leaf through and re-leaf through slowly, or quickly to see the figures come alive with an almost cinematic effect, with that blank page between one table and another that invites you to awaken the memory of past emotions, drawing them, writing a thought or simply leaving a mark.

The room belongs to a period in Mattotti's career in which his great love for comics was slowly expanding towards other territories, towards the exploration of other rhythms and structures that were not the obligatory ones of the narrative, with a beginning and an end. It was therefore born as a graphic poem free from schemes and conventions, a slow documentary in which with a distant eye one perceives the sweetness, the tension, the curiosity, the essence of reality. But above all, the fundamental theme of the discovery of the other is investigated, which the artist later developed with a variety of techniques in the volume Stanze , and which still accompanies it today, always stronger and more fruitful.

Lorenzo Mattotti lives and works in Paris. After completing his architectural studies, he published his first comics at the end of the 70s and, at the beginning of the 80s, he founded the collective Valvoline with other artists. In 1984 he created Fires, which was welcomed as an event in the world of comics and won important international awards. His work, from Accidents to Stigmata , passing through Mr. Spartacus, Doctor Nasty, The man at the window and numerous other titles, evolves in the constant sign of a great coherence and, at the same time, of the eclecticism of an artist who chooses to continually explore new territories. Today his books are translated all over the world, while the drawings appear in magazines and newspapers such as The New Yorker, Le Monde, Das Magazin, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Le nouvel Observateur, Corriere della Sera and la Repubblica . In the field of fashion and design, Mattotti interprets the models of the most famous designers in the Vanity magazine and, in 2010, creates all the covers of the monthly Domus .Illustrates various children's books, including Pinocchio and Eugenio , who in 1993 won the Bratislava Grand Prix, one of the highest awards in the children's publishing sector. , advertising campaigns and posters, among others for the Cannes Film Festival, in 2000, and for the Roman Summer. In 2002 he published Jekyll & Hyde and in 2003 The noise of frost , both for Einaudi and, in the same period, I Manifesti di Mattotti (2002) and Angkor (2003) for Nuages; in 2008 Notes on the landscape were released for Tricromia and The Adventures of Pinocchio for Einaudi's “I Millenni” series; in 2009 he published, for Orecchio Acerbo / Gallimard, Hansel and Gretel , whose incredible illustrations complement the texts by Neil Gaiman in the American edition. In 2010, the work The Raven (Il corvo , Einaudi, 2012) was born from a collaboration with Lou Reed. Mattotti also works for the cinema: in 2004, he contributed to the film Eros by Wong Kar-wai, Steven Soderbergh and Michelangelo Antonioni, taking care of the presentation segments of each episode; in 2007 he made one of the six episodes of the collective animated film Peur (s) du noir - Fears of the dark ; in 2011 he worked on the animated sequences of the film by Charles Nemes, Il était une fois ... peut-être pas and in 2012 he completed the backgrounds and characters of the animated film Pinocchio by Enzo D'Alò. In 2012 #logosedizioni inaugurates the “Works” series, with a first volume dedicated to pastel illustrations, followed by the volume dedicated to the world of fashion. In 2013, again for #logosedizioni, the visionary work Oltremai was released and exhibited at the Pinacoteca di Bologna. In 2014 he created Vietnam for Louis Vuitton's "Travel Book" series and in 2017 he returned to collaborate with Jerry Kramsky, creating a new graphic novel with an epic breath, Ghirlanda (#logoseditions). Ghirlanda wins the Gran Guinigi prize during the 2017 edition of Lucca Comics & Games.
Numerous his personal exhibitions, including the anthology at Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, at the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem, at the Museums of Porta Romana in Milan, up to the most recent, the retrospective Sconfini (2016-2017) and Covers for The New Yorker (2018), for which #logosedizioni edited the catalogs. In 2018 #logosedizioni inaugurates a new series that proposes the artistic evolution of the cartoonist Mattotti in a new guise, starting with The man at the window and Stigmata . Recently Lorenzo Mattotti directed the animated feature film The famous invasion of the bears in Sicily , based on the novel of the same name by Dino Buzzati, released in October 2019 and presented at the Cannes Film Festival 2019 in the selection “Un certain regard ". Mattotti's universe now ranges seamlessly between comics, painting, illustration and animation.