Lorenzo Mattotti, born in 1954, is one of the greatest contemporary illustrators, an eclectic drawer always wedded to change and transformation. Mattotti is always looking for new creative paths stimulating his immagination and, if possible, showing him new visions to question to understand himself and the world around him.
Tireless creator of images and imaginary, Mattotti likes to change and experiment even with different languages and techniques: drawings on sketchbooks, comics, illustrations, paintings. He always tries to tell a story with a single image, and beyond it.
In his numerous comics, the ones richly painted with crayons, or the ones tremulously scratched with nibs, landscape has a central role.
The damp plains in Huckleberry Finn's adventures, as the verdant grassland of “La zona fatua” or the black tangles of “Chimera”, are usually protagonists, non only in the description of the ambient, but also in the emotional impact that they give to the narration.
This proneness in Mattotti grows out of a personal sensibility and pleasure. Landscape generates from a dimension where staring becomes thoughts and ideas.
This narrative vocation returns, in comics, illustrations and paintings, and gets exasperated due to the necessity of condensing in a single figure all the evocative strenght of the matter of drawing.
And so the changing of techniques (charcoal, oil, crayon, brush, watercolor...) becomes the right focus to interpretate this space of reality.
Landscape in Mattotti is container and contained, character and protagonist of stories that always put in the middle the filter of the stare of the artist.