If the creator of Tex Giovanni Luigi Bonelli was a writer lent to comics and never returned Paolo Eleuteri Serpieri is a painter lent to comics. He was born in Venice on February 29, 1944 (he only celebrated nineteen birthdays, in theory), but he is Roman by adoption. A pupil first of Renato Guttuso and then of Renzo Vespignani since 1975 he brings his pictorial art and his knowledge of the representation of the human body in comics, first in the western one and then in the erotic and science fiction one.
It is significantly entitled “Serpieri and the other universes. Between West eros and science fiction ›› the great exhibition that celebrates him in the beautiful Palazzo Vitelli in Sant’Egidio di Città di Castello until 24 October.
An exhibition curated by Pietro Alligo from Turin, Serpieri’s publisher (with the Lo Scarabeo publishing house) and his friend for forty years.
“I met him in 1979, talking to the famous Argentine designer Juan Zanotto – he says. – He was already getting noticed for his beautiful western comics. Since then we have become friends and this exhibition, organized with the friends of Tiferno Comics (Tiferno is the ancient name of Città di Castello, whose inhabitants are precisely called Tifernati Ed), celebrates its forty-five years of career ››.
There are twelve large rooms of which nine are dedicated to the tables of Serpieri (over two hundred), between the West and the erotic science fiction of Druuna, and three to his three reference genres (western, science fiction and eros) created by Italian authors, from which the subtitle of the exhibition.
It is therefore not just an exhibition on Serpieri, but there are also tables by many other masters of Italian comics, from Benito Jacovitti to Dino Battaglia, from Hugo Pratt to Milo Manara from Aurelio Galep Galleppini (the creator of Tex) to Guido Crepax as well as to tributes from younger authors, such as Stefano Biglia, Claudio Villa or Alessandro Bocci.
Very interesting is the room in which the little-known plates of the comic version of the Bible made in the early Eighties for the French Larousse are exhibited (in Italy it was published by Edizioni Paoline).
They are extremely realistic, carnal, concrete, Serpieri is agnostic, for him the Bible only tells stories of men, and are contrasted with the illustrations of another great master of comics, Sergio Toppi, which are instead mystical, almost theological, like the version of the I announce to Mary with a light that from above strikes the future mother of Jesus.
One room is dedicated to the very personal version of Tex by Serpieri which was released only in 2015, in the volume “The hero and the legend”, also written by him, which inaugurated a new series of special Texts in the French format (hardback volumes 48 pages).
“I am satisfied with the exhibition, I am amazed that my images work even when enlarged – says Serpieri. – For me it all started with cinema. As a boy I had been a reader of comics, but I wasn’t much of a fan, nor had I ever thought about doing them. And, more than the epic of the West, the Indians, those who are now called Native Americans, and their stories have always fascinated me at the cinema. John Ford’s Indians or more movies on their side like Red Raven won’t have my scalp! (1972) or Dances with wolves (1990) ››.
Then in 1985, from a sort of evolution of her Indians, Druuna was born, a girl who lives in a corrupt and decadent future world.
“As I have often said, she is my ideal woman, with her carnality, between the Latin American and the North African. Among my sources of inspiration at the time there was the French actress Valérie Kaprisky, in those years very famous for films such as Last Breath and La femme publique, of (also) South American origins.
She is a kind of girl next door, white and pure who lives in a terrifying world that she tries to adapt to in order to survive.
It is certainly not the American heroine who fights and shoots, in an American film project they wanted to transform it in this way and I said no to production ››.
Druuna has sex with anyone, men, women, trans, monsters, always maintaining its purity and trying, even when forced to do so, to get pleasure from it.
In each room of the exhibition in the center there is a stage furniture, the tree of the hangmen of the West, an intriguing bed, various keyholes (in the room XXX forbidden to minors). The most interesting is probably the statue (created by Michele Guaschino from Turin and his studio) which depicts a human who has become monstrous due to the mysterious evil that affects the world of Druuna (“Morbus Gravis” is the title of his first adventure) .
The exhibition catalog (published by Lo Scarabeo) is also very beautiful, in which there are interventions by a large part of the elite of Italian comic criticism: Vincenzo Mollica, Gianni Brunoro, Giulio Cesare Cuccolini, Luca Barbieri, Ferruccio Giromini, Daniele Bevilacqua, Roberto Guarino, Moreno Burattini, Giovanni Nahmias, to name a few.
All together to celebrate one of the last historical masters of Italian comics.
A great loan to comics from painting as Bonelli’s had been from literature.