Lorenzo Mattotti. Lines, colors, visions

Born in Brescia in 1954, Lorenzo Mattotti is among the most important contemporary illustrators and comic book authors. Having moved to Bologna in the late 1970s, he soon came into contact with the lively environment of Italian graphic experimentation, helping to redefine the languages of comics and illustration. His work is distinguished by an expressive and pictorial use of color, by dynamic lines and by a continuous formal research that crosses comics, publishing, animated cinema and international illustration. Lorenzo Mattotti is celebrated at Romics 36 with the awarding of the Romics D'Oro.
This exhibition offers an immersion in the shapes and colours of Mattotti's visual universe through a selection of large-format printed images that accompany the visitor at certain pivotal moments in his artistic career. The exhibition brings together works from diverse fields –comics, animation, and editorial illustration–, showcasing the artist's extraordinary ability to transform visual storytelling into a sensory experience.
A first focal point is dedicated to Fuochi (1984), a work considered a fundamental turning point in the history of contemporary European comics. Originally published in Alter Alter magazine, the book marks a radical overcoming of the graphic tradition of comics thanks to an intensely pictorial use of pastels and a narrative construction suspended between dream, memory and hallucination. The exhibition features reproductions of plates and the famous cover of the work, which has become one of the symbols of Mattotti's poetics.
The journey continues with a selection of covers created for the American magazine The New Yorker, with which the artist has collaborated since the 1990s. In these images, Mattotti translates the urban imagery of the American metropolis into synthetic and highly evocative scenes, where color and composition transform everyday moments into small visual narratives.
A section is dedicated to Mattotti's work in animated cinema with images created for the feature film The Famous Invasion of the Bears in Sicily (2019), a film directed by Mattotti himself and based on the famous children's book by Dino Buzzati. The film represents the meeting point between the artist's graphic imagery and the tradition of the illustrated fairy tale: essential forms, vibrant color palettes, and suspended atmospheres construct a visual narrative capable of maintaining the poetic dimension of the original work.
Alongside this, the exhibition features images taken from the illustrated interpretation of the fairy tale by brothers Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, Hansel and Gretel, in which Mattotti reinterprets the story through an intense and contemporary visual language. Dark forests and stick figures transform the fairy tale into an emotional space dominated by tension, wonder, and uneasiness.
Taken together, these works convey the richness of an artistic journey that, from the 1980s to today, has continually redefined the boundaries between comics, illustration, and visual art. Through fluid lines and powerful color fields, Mattotti constructs images that don't just tell a story, but invite the viewer into it, transforming the gaze into an immersive experience.