Lorenzo Mattotti brings his Fantastico Altrove between fairy tale, color and memory to Peccioli

On Friday, March 28, the exhibition Un Fantastico Altrove, dedicated to Lorenzo Mattotti (Brescia, 1954), one of the most celebrated contemporary Italian cartoonists and illustrators, opened in Peccioli, in the rooms of Palazzo Senza Tempo. The event, scheduled until Oct. 19, 2025, is part of the cultural project Thought Peccioli, whose theme for this year - crossing the things of the world - finds in Mattotti an ideal interpreter, capable of translating a visionary and poetic elsewhere into images.

Through an exhibition itinerary divided into eight sections, the author takes the visitor on an imaginative journey that embraces the great fantastic stories of literature, from Hansel and Gretel to The Travels of Gulliver, via Freud, Pinocchio, The Famous Invasion of the Bears in Sicily and The Raven. Each stage is meant to be an open window on a world that is at once fairy tale, symbol and memory, narrated with that unmistakable stroke - strong yet light, gentle yet imperative - that makes Mattotti one of the most internationally recognized illustrators.

Mattotti’s elsewhere is populated by fantastic animals and creatures, fairy landscapes, twisted lines, exploding colors and even a blackness that knows how to shine. A visual universe that does not want to limit itself to showing, but invites us to enter, to strip away the superstructures of everyday life to rediscover an original, childlike and free gaze. His images tell of what we have been and what we could become again, if only we find the courage to abandon the artificial and return to dreaming.

The meaning of Mattotti’s work is all in his approach: never aggressive, never arrogant, but absorbed, melancholy and at the same time welcoming. His art aims to be a machine of the imagination that has nothing to do with the technological artificiality that governs our present, but rather a gesture of return to the essential, an invitation to walk generous and visionary paths. Just as the Sound Tales of the Radar Quartet suggested, “Come with me into my fairy world to dream, you don’t need an umbrella, a little red coat or a pretty satchel, all you need is a little imagination and goodness.”

The works on display come from some of the most important publishing projects of the artist’s career: The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi (Bompiani, 2019), The Mystery of the Ancient Creatures with texts by Jerry Kramsky (Orecchio Acerbo, 2007), Freud’s Analytical Tales (Einaudi, 2011), Hansel & Gretel illustrated with Neil Gaiman (Orecchio Acerbo, 2018), The Raven with Lou Reed (Einaudi, 2009), the special edition of Dino Buzzati’s The Famous Invasion of the Bears in Sicily (Mondadori, 2019), Bernardo Zannoni’s I miei stupidi intenti (Sellerio, 2023), and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, scheduled for release in 2025 by Einaudi. Eight stories, eight visions, eight worlds to traverse the things of the world.

“Hansel & Gretel,” says Mattotti about one of his best-known works, “was one of the few books whose graphic interpretation came naturally to me. The use of black and white ink to express the anxieties created an effect of immediacy. The images appeared to me almost instantaneously, as a logical follow-up to my personal research in recent years on the pictorial interpretation of the forest. These large, almost abstract compositions of foliage immersed in half-light became the ideal landscape in which to place the characters from the Brothers Grimm fairy tale. The first seven images I made on the spur of the moment in two days. The others followed almost as quickly, a symptom of the fact that everything was ripe in me. The story of the two little brothers who end up falling into the clutches of an anthropophagous witch after being abandoned in the forest by their parents terrified me as a child. And over the years, bewilderment, darkness, the embodiment of evil, threatening nature -- these have been among the most frequent themes in my work. The large improvised compositions and sketches made earlier brought me very close to abstraction, resulting in a pure pictorial quest that no longer had anything to do with either narrative or reality. By simply reintroducing the outline of the characters into that tangle of brushstrokes evoking trunks, tree branches and winding paths, I was able to pick up the thread of the story, making the vicissitudes of the two little brothers follow one another. Restoring texture to a world that had become a kind of magma of light and shadow.”

Born in 1954 in Brescia but an adopted Parisian since 1998, Lorenzo Mattotti is among the few Italian authors to have been able to build a transversal career balanced between comics, illustration, publishing, cinema and visual arts. After studying architecture in Venice and making his debut in the late 1970s with strips inspired by the expressionism of José Muñoz and Carlos Sampayo, Mattotti moved to Bologna. Here in 1983 he founded the Valvoline collective, together with Daniele Brolli, Giorgio Carpinteri, Igort, Marcello Jori and Jerry Kramsky, with the aim of placing comics in dialogue with contemporary arts, from music to fashion, from advertising to cinema.

With Fuochi (1984), published in Alter Alter, Mattotti revolutionized the language of comics, establishing himself as a master of color and atmosphere. This was followed by dozens of volumes - for adults and children - translated worldwide, as well as prestigious collaborations with The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Cosmopolitan, Le Monde, Internazionale, la Repubblica and Corriere della Sera. His illustrations have dressed the covers of Einaudi, Garzanti, Guanda, Mondadori, Penguin, Rizzoli and Seuil, while his posters have promoted events such as the Cannes Film Festival (2000) and the Venice Film Festival (2018 to 2022).

Cinema is also an integral part of his path. In 1995 he made illustrations for a French series on Bluebeard. In 2004 he collaborated on the film Eros, directed by Antonioni, Soderbergh, and Wong Kar-wai. In 2008 he participates in the animated film Peur(s) du noir. But it is in 2019 that he signs his cinematic masterpiece: The Famous Invasion of the Bears in Sicily, based on the book by Dino Buzzati. The film is selected at the Cannes Film Festival in the Un certain regard section, and in 2020 it gets a César nomination for best animated film.

The exhibition Un Fantastico Altrove in Peccioli is thus meant to be an invitation to dream, a bridge between the archaic and the possible, a poetic act that embraces childhood, literature, the unconscious and art.

Lorenzo Mattotti brings his Fantastico Altrove between fairy tale, color and memory to Peccioli

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