The Mart acquires the archive of Prof. Bad Trip, icon of the Italian underground

The Mart of Rovereto enriches its heritage with the acquisition of thearchive of Gianluca Lerici, better known as Prof. Bad Trip (La Spezia, 1963 - Massa, 2006), one of the most recognizable and influential artists of theItalian and international underground. The entrance of the archive to the museum’sArchivio del ’900 represents a major step in the study and enhancement of artistic practices related to the counterculture, as it restores a broad and unprecedented cross-section of the work and creative process of a central figure in the visual and musical landscape of the last decades of the 20th century.

The archive, generously donated to the Mart by the artist’s wife, Jenamarie Filaccio, is already available for consultation and includes an extraordinary amount of heterogeneous materials. Original drawings and collages, comic book plates, matrices of illustrated leaflets, notebooks of graphic notes, posters, fanzines, press reviews, books by theartist one-offs, photographs, linoleum print matrices, sound carriers such as CDs, vinyls and audiocassettes with graphics created by Lerici himself, audiovisuals, painted garments and objects of various kinds, from an applique lamp to a prototype board game, compose a fund that restores the complexity of a radical and interdisciplinary artistic practice. Alongside the archive, a book collection also enters the Mart, documenting Prof. Bad Trip’s lively activity in the field of comics and illustration, with numerous rare and hard-to-find publications.

Gianluca Lerici, who was born in La Spezia on May 21, 1963 and died prematurely on November 25, 2006, was one of the most original protagonists of the Italian underground scene. A cartoonist, illustrator, collagist, painter and sculptor, he constructed a visionary and disturbing imagery, shot through with irony and social criticism, capable of mixing punk counterculture, cyberpunk, psychedelia and pop culture. His artistic training has been intertwined from the beginning with music and self-publishing, in a path that has always rejected disciplinary boundaries.

Between the late 1970s and early 1980s he was active as a DJ at Radio Popolare Alternativa and as vocalist of Holocaust, a hardcore punk band linked to the Granducato Hardcore circuit. In those years he participated in the first cassette compilations of the Italian punk scene, coming into contact with a national and international network of independent musicians and producers. At the same time he started a prolific self-publishing activity, publishing in 1980 the fanzine Anarchy, followed by Archeopteryx and especially Azione Aliena, a collective project but strongly marked by his visual imprint. In these experiences, collage, comics and texts merge into a feverish graphic flow that becomes the hallmark of his work.

Collage, for Lerici, is not only a technique but a real political and aesthetic gesture, openly theorized in the manifesto Riciclart!, published in 1988 in the folio-manifesto Stanza 101. During the 1980s he collaborated with dozens of Italian and international fanzines, becoming a central figure in the circuits of mail art, underground comix and DIY micro-publishing. His visual style, characterized by a horror vacui of mutant figures, mechanical fragments, pop icons and mystical symbologies, was definitively consolidated in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

A key role in this process is played by his association with Decoder magazine, a landmark of the Italian cyberpunk scene. Through Decoder, Lerici becomes the artist symbol of an imaginary that short-circuits technology, the body, hallucinations, control and freedom. In 1992 ShaKe Edizioni published Il Pasto Nudo, a visionary adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ novel, introduced by Fernanda Pivano. The work, which quickly became a cult, marks one of the high points of his comics production and paves the way for numerous other publishing projects, including Mondo techno, Bad Trip Comix, Double Dose, Bad Mutants and Psycho, as well as collaborations with magazines such as Frigidaire, Tempi Supplementari, Rumore and Vinile.

In 2002 Mondadori published the anthology Almanacco apocalittico, consecrating Prof. Bad Trip among a wider audience. In parallel, Lerici develops a vast production of color collages, in which characters, mystical figures, products and symbols of power are deformed and hybridized in a pop and dystopian key. In the 1990s he also intensified his pictorial activity, making large canvases in acid and complementary colors, populated by giant insects, robots, freaks and mutated deities. A graduate of the Academy of Sculpture in Carrara, he combines painting with sculptural production in plaster, terracotta and papier-mâché, often made together with his partner Jenamarie Filaccio.

Also fundamental is his work as an editorial illustrator. Lerici signs covers for Einaudi, Feltrinelli, Castelvecchi, ShaKe, AAA edizioni, Agenzia X, DeriveApprodi and especially Mondadori, for which he creates covers of texts by authors such as Guy Debord, Edgar Allan Poe, Niccolò Ammaniti and Cornell Woolrich. At the same time he builds a powerful visual imagery for underground and rock music, making record covers and bootlegs for labels such as Manic Depression Records, Area Pirata and Sonic Studio and collaborating with artists from the noise, industrial and hardcore scene. Between 1998 and 2000, composer Fausto Romitelli dedicated the musical trilogy Professor Bad Trip to him, sealing the cross-genre impact of his work.

Since his death, Gianluca Lerici’s work has been the subject of exhibitions and retrospectives in prominent institutional settings, including Manifesta 7, the CAMeC in La Spezia, and the Mart in Rovereto itself. The most recent retrospective exhibition of his production was A saucerful of colors. Prof. Bad Trip Gianluca Lerici, which was held in 2016 at Tekè Gallery in Carrara and then had stops in Rome and Palermo. Today, Prof. Bad Trip is recognized as a key figure in European underground art, capable of anticipating and embodying the visual, political and cultural anxieties of contemporaneity. With the acquisition of his archive, the Mart not only preserves a unique patrimony, but also offers scholars and the public a fundamental tool for understanding a crucial season of Italian counterculture and the role that art played in recounting its tensions, utopias and contradictions.

The Mart acquires the archive of Prof. Bad Trip, icon of the Italian underground

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