Macerata – “I would like to say everything with one line” said Hugo Pratt. And indeed the stories of his melancholy sailor with the earring always had the consistency of comic novels establishing themselves as absolute classics, from Tale of Venice a The Golden House of Samarkand. Now “the cartoonist”, as Pratt liked to define himself, the father of Corto Maltese who has enclosed the moods of his sailor in his essential and expressive graphic style which combines the lessons of the American master Milton Caniff with the solutions of the “line Chiara” Franco-Belgian, hiding behind cultured and, at the same time popular, imagination, lands in Recanati with an exhibition scheduled from 25 August to 7 January.
As part of the third edition of the Recanati Comics Festival, the exhibition spaces of the Civic Museum of Villa Colloredo Mels will host the From Ulysses to Corto Maltese, a journey into the imagination of Hugo Pratt. Alongside Lorenzo Lotto’s masterpieces from Recanati and Giacomo Leopardi’s memorabilia, over 60 original plates, films and reproductions will mark a path full of literary references that inspired the works of Pratt, from Jorge Luis Borges to Roberto Arlt, from Leopoldo Lugones to James Oliver Curwood.
Ulysses, 1963
And so the master of the ninth art who disguises the reader as an adventurer leading him from Russia to the Silk Road will present himself to the guests of Villa Colloredo Mels with the 26 complete tables of the Odyssey, created in 1963 for “Il Corriere dei piccoli”. Ulysses was in fact the first sailor drawn by the artist who compared the Odyssey to “a kaleidoscope of all the situations in the adventure novel”. The drawings of the globetrotting master who seduced Woody Allen and Tim Burton restore to the reader the intensity of light and wind, the power of the sea, the typical atmospheres of picaresque literature. Thanks to the exhibition coming to Recanati, the public will meet the exotic characters that have characterized Pratt’s rich production of comics, setting sail with Corto Maltese for Rapa Nui, plowing the seas in the company of La Perouse heading towards Apia to meet Robert Louis Stevenson, and landing in the Venice of Baron Corvo and again in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the company of William Shakespeare. He will meet again Parzival, Hermann Hesse and Moby Dick, Rasputin and Jack London, to continue flying together with Saint Exupéry.
The exhibition was born from the collaboration between the Municipality of Recanati, the Arcadia Association, the Museum System and Cong Sa.
Read also:
• 25 years without Hugo Pratt, the dreamer “cartoonist” who conquered the ninth art with drawn literature