JITTER .Interview_Magazin #05

»Non of us is authentic all the time« An Interview with Lorenzo Mattotti Von Andreas R auth

Magazin für Bildkultur

Jitter | WebExtra.Interview

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»None of us is Authentic all the Time«

interview Lorenzo Mattotti

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Italian Lorenzo Mattotti, born 1954, has been one of the most innovative and idiosyncratic artists in Comic and illustration for almost three decades. While in his darkest work, early 20th century expressionism meets Francis Bacon and Edward Hopper, the brighter ones include Matisse, Sonja Delaunay and Art Deco among their ancestors. his early masterpiece the comic Fires, a feverish Nightmare in search of an identity, published in 1986, earned him the title of a master of color – And a Max & Moritz Award. Mattotti also won an Eisner Award in 2003 for his graphic novel, Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde. His work also included illustrations for children’s books, magazines such as The New Yorker and Sßddeutsche Zeitung Magazin, advertising, and animation.

Beyond this he is well known for his fashion illustration.

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Have you ever thought of making a comic that is placed in the fashion world?

No, not really. I did an ironic story, Interior elegance. The story was published in Labyrinthes, 1986 and it’s a trip to a world where people are always in direct relation with their clothes. But I used a style different from the fashion illustration, a more comic style.

When did you start with fashion illustration?

In the eighties Condé Nast published a very trendy new magazine in Italy, Vanity, now Vanity Fair, which was specialized in fashion illustration. It was October 1984 when they asked two different Italian comic artists for some fashion illustration and I was really not so interested. My artist friend agreed to this commission and because we were a group then, I was obliged to do so. They gave me three very bad photos of clothes and I tried to realize the most simple idea in describing the dress as best as I could, using the same technique as in my comic book Fires. When it was done I was convinced this was the first and last fashion illustration I would ever do. But the art director surprisingly liked it and asked me to do the cover (ill. p. 64), which was more of a portrait than a fashion illustration.

How did the story continue?

My cooperation with Vanity lasted about four years. It was a good way to learn how to do a job. Fashion illustration helped me to survive as an artist and I learned to work very efficiently. The cover, for example, had to be done in one day. It was also very interesting to work closely with director Anna Piaggi, a very well known woman in the fashion business, who explained her ideas and referred to paintings, atmospheres and the like. She was followed by Alberto Nodolini, who later changed to Vogue.

On one hand I was very happy they liked my work, but it was also kind of strange for me.

You personally were not into fashion, were you?

No, not at all. At the time I was a very dramatic and serious person without any sense for irony or glamour, so working in fashion was very strange for me at first, but I learned to create a sort of distance and irony in my work. I worked with very theatrical costumes, like Gaultier, very postmodern. For me it was strange on one hand, but funny on the other. Compared to comics, which have always been very serious work for me, this

was a completely different way of approaching.

Did you study the work of other fashion illustrators?

Oh yes, in that period I studied illustrations from Gruau and Erté. I was also fascinated by the first fashion illustrations in Vogue of the twenties and thirties, which served as references for me.

What makes a good fashion illustration?

I prefer a good drawing. At the time I started with fashion illustration, there were many good illustrators who produced fascinating work. Today it seems more difficult to find good illustrations or rather fascinating images. Illustrators who are able to put a cultural background into their images are very rare. So, for me a good illustration must be a good drawing and an evocative picture that brings up something behind, a story maybe, a sort of comedy, a sort of drama or narrative. Many illustrators don’t seem interested in that and you don’t understand their drawing because it is so superficial. You see it and forget it at once. Sometimes you find very good illustrators in street fashion. They have a stylistic elegance combined with a cultural background. It is also necessary that the clothing is a part of the image concept.

But after all, maybe I’m not a good fashion illustrator, even though I did a lot of them for Cosmopolitan and the German Playboy to name some. However, my last fashion illustration dates five years back. Nowadays I’m only occasionally asked to do an illustration for a magazine.

/The rigid force for constant change is burning talents just like that/

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Fashion illustration is a very fast business under high pressure of the new and trendy. The rigid force for constant change is burning talents just like that. We were trendy in the eighties but not now. Now I’m an old illustrator. (laughs) Did you learn about color from fashion illustration?

I already had intense experience with color from Fires (ill. p. 73) and Spartaco, which was perhaps the reason they chose me. But yes, this was an important aspect in fashion illustration, too. Because for some clothes I had to work with colors that weren’t mine, you know? I learned a lot about the relation of color, material and form. Drawing a dress, a tissue, a material wasn’t as easy all the time.

Are you in fear of or in love with color?

Neither. Working with color is a very natural process for me, though sometimes it bores me. Then I switch to black and white, which is more essential and very direct. It is more like a language, a scripture. Color, on one hand is more spectacular, on the other hand I get charged with energy, even happiness. My colorful comics like Fires or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (ill. p.

73), allthough they are kind of thrilling, working on them gave me a lot of energy. It is, however, impossible for me to stay with color all the time.

At a certain point I have to leave and forget in order to discover new things later. Also I can only work with color as a material. When you work with color on the computer, in my opinion, something important is lost. Because you can change the hues so easily, one is as good as any other and you don’t understand what makes the difference. Working with color as a real material forces you to make precise decisions. When you put one color next to another you really can understand the effect it has on the emotional quality of the whole. It is very important for me to have an intimate relation with color. I don’t get any pleasure out of using it in an industrial way.

Wouldn’t you say that both the colored as much as the black and whites are dramatic?

The black and white ones are definitely more dramatic, since color tends to soften the impact. By adding color to a work, I instantly get a more poetic atmosphere with a touch of melancholy or nostalgia, and sometimes even with a kind of sweetness.

In comparison black and white is very essential, yet even poor, and it

forces a more compressed resolution.

That is what makes it dramatic.

Isn’t drama more a result of high contrast – whether of color or of brightness?

With color you have more nuances to play around with. You can be dramatic as well, of course, but in a different sense. For me black and white has a very dry, say brittle or even fragile attitude. Color is a richer and more spectacular alphabet, however, black and white is more difficult to learn.

Is your work in color influenced by your black and white work and vice versa?

No, not really. I mean, the line influences the way of using color through the form it describes. But otherwise not. Mainly in illustration, I use the contrast of flatness against volume.

With color you have more possibilites to give volume to the fabric, while the lines keep a sense of flatness. Fashion illustration was very interesting in terms of decoration. Maybe this sounds pejorative, but it isn’t. Fashion illustration really helped me to master decoration. If color emphasizes on volume, then oppositely, black and white is much more like destroying the volume, destroying the spatial impression. At least that’s the way I use it. Working with color or black and white means using a completely different approach.

Can you describe this a little bit further?

When you look at the very strong black and white work with large black areas you still can see different layers of thinner lines underlying. When it gets too articulate I destroy the drawing, putting dark layers of shadow with bold ink brushes upon it.

Chimera (ill. p. 70) starts with only a few and open lines and ends up with pages almost clompletely covered in black.

Yes, this is a good example. The forest, the woods are very dark (ill. p.

71). That’s where my recent black and white work is going. It gets darker and darker, with the light glowing from behind the stage. It is similar to the watercolor work I did on Nepalese paper, where I used transparencies with different shades instead of volume or solid color.

The woods first appeared in Chimera and developed into a sujet itself? Your website shows an exhibition of forest pictures exclusively.

Yes, I did a whole series of forest pictures for an exhibition in Italy four months ago.

What size are the forest pictures?

I imagine them being very large.

The series is about one meter sev-

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enty and I did also a tryptich, with each segment being one and a half meter in size. However, the first forest paintings were much smaller, more like A4 and then they grew bigger and bigger. I work with very big brushes now. Recently I used this technique to illustrate Hänsel und Gretel.

Your comics like Fires, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Le Bruit du Givre (ill. p. 73) are intense psychological studies, inner views of the hero’s character. How much of your own biography has been worked into it?

For Le Bruit du Givre I worked with author Jorge Zentner, with whom I have collaborated in a very close relation for a long time now. The procedure is not like him writing the story and me drawing the picture afterwards. We developed the story step by step each time we felt the need to continue.

Many elements have a private background with Jorge Zentner and also my way of living. When I first read the finished story I really had the impression it could have happened to me.

Though it is not based on my own biography it is very close to my way of living in a certain period of my life.

Le Bruit du Givre comes closest to what

I imagined a comic story should be.

Narrating a story along an outline of realism while at the same time giving space for inner impressions, emotions, images of the mind. Shifting continously from outside to inside, and vice versa in this way, was an exciting experiment and I’m quite happy with the result.

To me all of your work concentrates on the relation between the inner and the outer view.

Well, Fires is a very visionary metaphoric story. Le Bruit du Givre is metaphoric in a way but also more realistic. Jekyll is a classic novel …

But they all deal with the question of identity and solitude.

Yes, this is an important subject of my work as a whole. In the case of Le Bruit du Givre the search for identity is performed in the hero’s journey, which in fact, is an almost ancient way of storytelling.

Does the aspect of identity also show up in your fashion illustration?

Many of the characters I used in fashion illustration are more like masks than realistic faces. In this period I was not so good in drawing women’s faces, so I started to paint them more like masks, more like symbols.

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They are less human but more like theatrical characters.

The emphasis lies more on the relation between the character and the dress with the dress creating the model’s identity. Later, I was more interested in portraits. I did a book titled Anonymes (ill. p. 69) with only faces of everyday women in an everyday dress. It was not the beauty of fashion that drew my attention, but the beauty that lies in character and personality.

What is the relation between these portraits and your fashion illustrations?

They can be seen as a part of my work’s evolution. From a more basic point of view you can say that the portraits continue what began with fashion illustrations. The rather graphic images changed little by little while I was exploring what women’s faces mean to me. Both can be seen as different parts of the discovery of the woman’s world.

In another interview you said you were listening to Brian Eno’s album Ambient #4 On Land while working on Fire. And with the music in mind, which emanates a very dark and cold but nonetheless intimate atmosphere, one can clearly see the influence it had.

Yes, the music of Brian Eno and Peter Gabriel was at that time very important for me. It gave me a lot of inspiration.

Does music still have an impact on your work?

Well, I still listen to music when I work but it is not as important as it was twenty years ago. When you’re young there are so many things to explore, and music especially has much more exciting qualities and a more direct power, but I still get a lot of ideas out of it. Recently I finished a collaboration with Lou Reed.

What kind of project was this?

It was already in 2000 when Lou Reed contributed text and music to an opera by Robert Wilson, POEtry, based on Edgar Allen Poe’s short stories and the famous poem The Raven. In the libretto, he combined original words by Poe with excerpts from essays and his own lyrics. However, the idea for the book came up one year ago and we first met in October 2008. Afterwards, we continued our dialogue about images and ideas via e-mail. In the end we created a book with an open concept. The illustrations are both color and black and white done with pencil, crayon, pastels and brush. To me it was a new encounter with Lou Reed’s music and I really appreciated working with him.

I’m very happy with the result. The book will be published in France, but I hope there will be editions in Germany and other countries.

You also work on animation projects…

Yes, together with Jerry Kramski I contributed to Fear(s) of the Dark, which was released in 2007. It’s a collection of animated shorts in black and white, directed by different comic arists. The story is about a village in fear of a monster in a swamp, who is said to kill people. But it’s more like a legend, you never know whether the monster, the holy crocodile, really exists or if it is just living in the unconscious.

I am currently working on a much bigger animation project, Pinocchio, a film by Enzo d’Alò. The whole thing started more or less 12 years ago but only now he got enough money to finish it. I will do the characters, landscapes and decoration based on the Pinocchio book I published in 1993 (ill. p. 72). For the next two years I will work on that. Hopefully, there will be some time left to

/It is very important for me to have an intimate relation with color.

I don’t get any pleasure out of using it in an industrial way/

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/If what happens on the paper doesn’t fit what I have in mind, I destroy it.

Even if it’s good/ continue with another comic story I started two years ago. To put all my ideas into practice, I need more energy than I actually have.

What is this story about?

It will be in black and white much in the way I did Chimera, but more ironic and less dramatic. Maybe it’s kind of continued Chimera, I don’t know, Chimera is a sort of poetry. The working title is Ghirlanda ( ill. p. 72), the land of Ghir, a country inhabited by strange, fantastic animals. Like in Chimera I work with very thin lines, but I try to evoke a sweet and lovely atmosphere. The story is originally inspired by The Mumins.

We talked about fashion illustration, illustration for poetry comics and animation. Your activities cover a wide range of styles and media – and we haven’t even dropped a word about advertising.

What does it mean for an artist’s authenticity to do all these different kind of things? Is the question of authenticity important to you?

With some work we stay true to our inner world and with others we work like artisans. I think we are always able, or at least should be if we’re strong inside, to step aside and work without worrying whether we will loose authenticity or not. That doesn’t mean you’re a hypocrite.

Work for magazines and the like is not very personal work. So it depends on purpose and context. I think none of us is authentic all the time. We don’t always arrive at a level of sincerity. I think, we are fighting with this constantly. When I do some work with irony it also can be authentic, but it is not as intense, it has a different nuance. We all have different characteristics to tap into. Authenticity is a very strong word for an artist.

It is often said a renaissance of illustration has taken place in recent years. Would you agree?

There are many talents out there, but I don’t know if there is really more space in the magazines. But I see that now illustration is now taking its place in the art world. The boundaries between drawing, illustration and art have disappeared more and more, because artists don’t simply do pictures anymore, they do film, installation and conceptual work. So the place of the picture is taken up by illustrators now. This is a new development.

Your wife opened a gallery for comic and illustration art last year, can you tell me a bit about that?

The name is Galerie Martel. She started last year in November and it is going very well. There aren’t many galleries like this. She shows comic and illustration work and aims at a new audience that is interested in both. She has shown the works of Art Spiegelman, Alberto Breccia, Milton Glaser, Tomi Ungerer, and in November we will show my work for Lou Reed and the Hänsel and Gretel pictures.

Do you live with your pictures, that is, do you hang them on the wall?

In my house I have two or three big pictures but in my studio the walls are normally empty. I don’t like to have many pictures on the wall.

How do you know a picture is finished?

That’s a good question. I know clearly when a picture is finished. It depends on your experience. For example the forests: to do this kind of work I must be very quick, there is just no time to reflect on what I do and adjustments are almost impossible. However, sometimes, when I try a new subject, it happens that a painting rests against the wall unfinished for two or three months. Sometimes I change them continuously which almost always turns out to be a bad idea, because I loose the image I started with. And sometimes the picture is already very good but doesn’t match what I have in mind. Then I continue, destroying it even if it was good, because I must arrive at what I have in mind. If what happens on the paper doesn’t fit what I am searching for, I continue. But these are necessary steps to solve a problem. At a certain point I clearly understand what I need to do to finish a picture. When the solution is found, and I start a new series afterwards, I know exactly what the pictures need. So, normally I’m very quick.

Interviewed by Andreas Rauth

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Illustrations: (from top to bottom and left to right) S. 62-63 Lorenzo Mattotti 2008, © Cantais Ludovic; The New Yorker 2008, Cover illustration; The New Yorker 1993 (detail) S. 64-65 The New Yorker 1993, cover illustration; The New Yorker 1998; MA X 1999; Vanity October 1984, cover illustration;

S. 67 Cosmopolitan 1995 S. 68-69 Vanity 1986; Anonymes 2000; S. 70-71 Chimera #1 2006 (Schimäre 1); Forest 1 2009 S. 72 Ghirlanda 2009 (unpublished); Pinocchio 1990/2008 (new edition)

S. 73 Fires 1990 (Feuer); Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde 2002; Le Bruit du Givre, with Jorge Zentner 2003 (Der Klang des Rauhreifs)

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Links www.mattotti.com www.galeriemartel.com Represented in Germany by Contours, Paul Derouet, www.contours-art.de

Selected publications (German edition) Feuer, Edition Kunst der Comics 1990 / Carlsen 2003 Der Mann am Fenster with Lilia Ambrosi, Alpha Comics 1992 Alleinsein, Ausstellungskatalog, Edition Kunst der Comics 1993 Fl체ster, with Jerry Kramsky, Edition Kunst der Comics 1993 Caboto with Jorge Zentner, Alpha Comics 1995 Labyrinthe with Jerry Kramsky, Alpha Comics 1997

Stigmata with Claudio Piersanti, Edition Kunst der Comics 2000 Dr. Jekyll & Mr Hyde, with Jerry Kramsky, Carlsen 2002 Der Klang des Rauhreifs, with Jorge Zentner, Carlsen 2003 Briefe aus ferner Zeit, Schreiber +Leser 2005 Schim채re 1, Avant-Verlag 2006 Spartaco, Edition 52 2006

DVD Fear(s) of the Dark, Directors: Richard Maguire, Lorenzo Mattotti, Marie Caillou, Blutch, Charles Burns, Prima Linea Productions Metrodome Video 2009 (UK Import) www.fearsofthedark-themovie.com Reviews online: www.walrusmagazine.com/ blogs/2009/03/17/fears-of-the-dark/ www.filmstarts.de/kritiken/100691Fear(s)-Of-The-Dark.html

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