Ode
one-of-a-kind artist's book
one-of-a-kind artist's book
"Ode”, is inspired to the following poem - almost a haiku - by Pier Paolo Pasolini: "bunch of red dahlias, earthly cloud, endless silence. In you the dead has no voice, and the sun shines with vermillion noons."
The book I realized based on this lines is very special to me because of an unexpectedly different concept and procedure behind it. I wanted to interpret this poem on a support, which could possible have had a "previous life" to fully express the deep feelings it transmitted to me. So I put aside the traditional, immaculate white paper I am always using to print editions and looked for the appropriate material - which turned to be an old encyclopedia, which I disassembled to re-compose in a latter moment.
Curiously enough, the procedure was completely different as well. When working on a book, I am usually carving both text and illustration onto the same plate in a fixed, somewhat static harmony. The necessity to carve the text along the image comes from the urgency to value the artistic aspect of the graphic sign, playing with its semantic valence.
In this project, notwithstanding, I worked in a completely different way, carving text and illustrations separately, in small plates made out of different materials, which I started assembling and printing in a huge amount of very different proofs - until I reached the desired harmony, like a still-frame of a wider image I had in my mind.
Chromatically, I worked on the colors until I found the ones I thought could express the poetry, the intensity, the drama.
Once fixed and solved the images, I then had to bind the book, which took the shape of a concertina to be able to join the separate pages - but also to offer a sculpture-book to guarantee a panoramic vision of the whole thing, without having to browse the pages, to even touch them.
This book has been acquired for sell by the Milanese gallery Demetra.
Curiously enough, the procedure was completely different as well. When working on a book, I am usually carving both text and illustration onto the same plate in a fixed, somewhat static harmony. The necessity to carve the text along the image comes from the urgency to value the artistic aspect of the graphic sign, playing with its semantic valence.
In this project, notwithstanding, I worked in a completely different way, carving text and illustrations separately, in small plates made out of different materials, which I started assembling and printing in a huge amount of very different proofs - until I reached the desired harmony, like a still-frame of a wider image I had in my mind.
Chromatically, I worked on the colors until I found the ones I thought could express the poetry, the intensity, the drama.
Once fixed and solved the images, I then had to bind the book, which took the shape of a concertina to be able to join the separate pages - but also to offer a sculpture-book to guarantee a panoramic vision of the whole thing, without having to browse the pages, to even touch them.
This book has been acquired for sell by the Milanese gallery Demetra.
