few words about me few words from others about my birth

few words about Roberto Innocenti

At the beginning of my sequence there was a lot of mud too. Alluvial mud, the one generated by the Arno river, the one that swept away every single trace of my existence up to that 4th of November 1966. All my drawings, comic strips, report cards and the Donald Duck comics, leaving me like new and without property, facing the rest of the Twentieth Century. But it was a different mud. It allowed, within the forgotten spaces in the cements, to inspect with the pencil on hypothesis that pledged little aesthetic and colorful rebirths, aimed to permit survival to whom – after declining the clod polished hoes or the cruel assembly lines – though with no qualification, could spend time drenched in fantasies used in a presumably profitable way.

The illusion, comforted by evident proof of appreciation, was fomented and also considered socially useful, up to the beginning of the eighties, running then ashore in front of the gain wall, with no aesthetic. In fact, before the Mona Lisa existed, nobody missed it. I produce something we don’t need too. Nobody misses a book I haven’t drawn yet, me neither. The illustration is the last use of the from-the- eighties survivor graphic arts,  unless the three following decades aren’t nothing but their fossilized tail, as boredom let us suppose. I envy Literature. It can reach the depths, but graphic art is fortunate, because it does not need any translation to cross frontiers. Love for Country, like the other ones, is relative. If mum drops you into the garbage bin, that does not make sense if your Country keeps you out from the Social State, which is the real belonging sign. I consider myself really lucky, instead of feeling nobody’s son, I was adopted abroad; a place with broad horizons where you could feel lonely, if you didn’t have the chance to meet many young man and women speaking your same language, happy to be somewhere else looking for a possible new life. A customary indignation, already sterilized caught me watching a TV program for children with my granddaughters, stuffed with childhood-oriented ads. We are going to shovel mud for a lot of time, before the season of colors and images without ogres come again, without hidden agenda or tricks.

But it is going to be like this, we all need them. If they are not suitable in sandwich stuffing, never mind.
 
Roberto Innocenti "Da Capo a Piedi"