Lorenzo Mattotti

Lorenzo Mattotti is an Italian artist, illustrator, comics author, graphic designer, director, production designer, and screenwriter. His illustrations have been published in such magazines as Cosmopolitan, Vogue, The New Yorker, Le Monde, and Vanity Fair.

From an early age, Mattotti was interested in comics, but because in those years there were no schools or universities that taught comic drawing, he enrolled in an architecture school. Although Mattotti did not complete his studies, the school of architecture “taught him to feel space, create layering in composition, and use different perspectives.”

In the 1980s in Italy, groups of independent comic artists began to form, along with creative collectives engaged, among other things, in publishing works. Mattotti joined the group “Valvoline,” which specialized in creating original intellectual comics and illustrations. Unlike many creative collectives of the time, “Valvoline” did not create political subtexts, as the French design group “Bazooka” did, and did not glorify the classic canons of comics, like “Frigidaire.” “Valvoline” sought to move away from a clear narrative line, playing with aesthetics and drawing on the art of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In 1982, inspired by the work of the German artist Lyonel Feininger, Mattotti published the comic Il signor Spartaco. Viaggio di un epicentrico. Incidentally, Mattotti was not alone in his passion for Feininger. All members of the “Valvoline” group liked to refer to the German artist, signing themselves “Uncle Feininger.”

From 1982 to 1984, he worked on the comic Incidenti. Using only pencils, he was unable to create an image with strong color impact, so he took up oil pastels and began constructing the comic with abstract patches. From an early age, his idol had been the artist Hugo Pratt, who was one of the first to break up the dry plot familiar to readers with psychological devices charged with emotion. To create silence and immersion in time and