One of the targets of BilBOlbul international comic festival is to focus on the work of an important author still lacking of the deserved success.
In the second edition of the Festival, the main exhibition is going to be dedicated to Gianni De Luca, with an overview on his forty years career.

Gianni De Luca. Il disegno pensiero is showing about 250 works, thanks to the collaboration of Laura De Luca and of some other collectors: pages and illustrations from his first stories as Il mago Da Vinci, to masterworks as Il commissario Spada, the trilogy based on Shakespeare’s works, Paulus and the remakes of Il giornalino di Gian Burrasca and The black arrow: a tale of the two roses.
The exhibition develops chronologically through De Luca’s style, and shows the elegance of his stroke, the plasticity of his shapes, the assortment of technical solutions, the accuracy of historical documentation, the particular attention to architectural drawing, the ability to create unforgettable human portraits.

There is going to be also a section all about the most important formal innovactions in De Luca’s graphic research, especially from the publication of Il commissario Spada in 1970 , a daring work not only from an aesthetic point of view but also for the contents: stories dealing with drugs, terrorism, organized delinquency, depression after economical boom in the seventies Italian society, generational crash, hippies communities, reminiscences of civil war during Second World War.
During the run of Il Commissario Spada series, De Luca brings to his style more and more revolutionary formal innovactions: the rendering of motion, the layouts new solutions, the abatement of single frames towards a concept of page as an endless sequence, the combination of graphic and painting techniques. One of the greatest international experimenters, at the same level as Crepax, Moebius, Eisner and Toppi.

Last but not least, the exhibition wants to show, through writings, essays and other different memorials, the absolute awareness that De Luca had about making comics: the civic and educational role images can have, the drawing as a method to explore different aspects of reality.