PISA, THE BLUE PALACE: ACQUA DELL'ELBA VISITS GIPI’S EXHIBITION.
After the inauguration of Marciana Borgo d’Arte (“Marciana Art Village”), yet another appointment related to creativity beckons Acqua dell’Elba. Indeed, on Friday the 14th of June, the exhibition “GIPI: Stories of An Artist” will be inaugurated in the rooms of the Blue Palace in Pisa, dedicated to an Italian comic book artist whose personal style managed to fascinate audiences from all over the world. Acqua dell’Elba is sponsoring the event, which is enriched by an interesting catalogue a few of whose themes we’d like to extrapolate, as they are particularly useful to understand the universe of GIPI.
SEARCHING FOR HONESTY: THE ESSENCE OF GIPI’S ART.
The exhibition dedicated to GIPI (real name: Gian Alfonso Pacinotti) in the Blue Palace allows us to take a journey through some of the fundamental developments in the Pisan artist’s career. There are original tables for some of his stories, from “Esterno Notte” of 2003 to “La Terra Dei Figli” of 2013, and this allows us to follow a very precise stylistic trajectory: the constant search for the most expressive medium to adequately convey the content and atmosphere of his stories. Water colours, ink and chalk alternate and mix with each other in the name of what GIPI often calls “honesty”, that is to say the desire not to content the readers with things they already know and which comfort them, but rather the will to always offer them a different point of view.
THE POETHIC QUALITY OF GIPI’S STORIES
Given that GIPI’s works are characterised by the variety of pictorial and graphic forms he used, it is possible to find within them an extreme coherence of content, which often rotates around themes such as personal identity, the value of memories, how History with a capital “H” is made up of the individual daily stories of its protagonists, the nightmare of identity loss and the alternation between real and virtual, intended both as the dream world as well as parallel universes created by videogames. In one word, what is at the centre of GIPI’s work is not aesthetical or narrative complacency, but rather the power of his portraits of people, as if they were carved into the rock by natural elements.
GIPI, SOCIETY AND THE WORLD OF TODAY
When an artist is capable of successfully communicating with the USA as well as with France, with Italy as well as South Korea, it means that he managed to touch the deepest chords which characterise the essence of what it means to be a human being, beyond any geographical provenance, reaching the hopes and fears which fill people’s lives all over the world, provoking unexpected reactions, capable of changing according to the different cultural traditions with which his stories resonate. Because stories, when they are well conceived and narrated, can speak to the soul of people, captivating them into their fantastic world with themes which go beyond actuality, to become universal. In GIPI’s books (because they aren’t just “comic books”, his “Una Storia” was the first graphic novel to be nominated for the Strega prize), this miracle happens constantly.
For the illustration: © Gipi (Gian Alfonso Pacinotti), Coconino Press.
