Valentina and Beyond: Brescia’s autumn between Crepax’s Dreams and Jacovitti’s illustrations – Brescia – Arte.co.uk

Brescia – “Crepax is an excellent storyteller, he knows that the image must be alive, collected in a flash, to never release the tension”. With these words Roland Barthes described the art of Guido Crepax. In a letter written in 1978 he adds a curious remark: «It would be nice to make a book together. I just made one with Robert Rauschenberg ».

Guido Crepax would be happy today to see his tables exhibit in the anthology “Guido Crepax. Dreams, games, Valentina. 1953-2003”, In implementation Until February 15, 2026 in the Santa Giulia Museum in Brescia.

“He was the first cartoonist in Italy to exhibit his tables in an art gallery, thanks to the intervention of Maurizio Fagiolo Dell’arco in the 1970s,” he says Antonio Crepax, son of the artist and president of the Crepax archive. “But the initiative was not welcomed. Giuliano Briganti Stroncò on Republicclaim that comics are not art ». By signing each table as if it were an autonomous work, Crepax showed the opposite.

Guido Crepax, Valentina Intrepida1972, China on Scholeler Rigid Cartoncine, 51 x 35.5 cm

On the path along the rooms, Alberto Fiz, the “contemporary” curator of the exhibition together with Ilaria Bignotti and Camilla RemondinaExplains Crepax’s work: «Every page of his stories is like a work in itself, regardless of everything else. He was an architect of training and interpreted the page as a place of writing and architecture. One of his hidden dreams, and his greatest ambition, was that every work that came from his specific branch – was advertising, the record industry, fashion, comics – and was considered the work of a contemporary artist “.

For the exhibition, more than 150 works were selected from original tables, sketches, record covers, games, storyboards and documents, including correspondence with Federico Fellini and Louise Brooks, the Silent Cinema Diva intended for his wife Luisa to give rise to the alchemy Valentina. He is a tribute to the figure of an artist who first, together with Hugo Pratt, opened the road to the graphic novels in Italy. “For me it was a new experience,” says Antonio Crepax. “For the first time, the exhibition was not made by the heirs.”

Along the way, the multiple souls of Crepax emerge: Artisan of the Image, Advertising, author of record covers, Creative able to transform the suggestions of Picasso, Kandinsky, Yves Klein or to smear in the comics. In an exposed table, the author goes to the graphic conversion of the Anthropométries By Yves Klein, versions in which the artist sprinkles with the famous blue nude models and she used as “Living Brush” staring at their print on the canvas.

Guido Crepax, Valentina – False Kandinsky1991, China Ink On Cardboard, Schoeller, 36.5 x 51 cm, © Crepax Archive

The thematic parts of the exhibition explore the theme of double and comic relationships with literature, cinema, theater, television, fashion and advertisements. We look good Valentina, the most famous creature of the brilliant comic book, which is growing together with the author. The first time was published in 1965 on the first editions of the Comic Magazine for Adults “Linus”. “The Lesmo Curve“It is the first comic book from Crepax and is also the first chance in which the photographer Valentina Rosselli debuts. It is clear that Crepax differs from the traditional canons of comics. While Valentina is photographing the fifteenth -century fresco of Masolino da Panicalal in the church of Castiglione Olona, ​​there is the feeling that the painted figure is released from the wall to communicate with her, shown in the same identical position as De Ridder in the background.
Elegant and thin in the 1960s, in the tables of the 90s, he became plastic, more expressive and more synthetic, to the latest drawings characterized by the disease.
In addition to the tables for adults, the first childish works also appear: the page of a diary that Guido preserved in Venice and hand stickers in 1937, when he was only four years old, intended to fulfill deceptions in tables spent on Fellini.

It is clear The great passion for Jules VerneThe taste for the game and the miniature, the trips in the cinema – famous the storyboard that Crepax makes for Nerosubianco di Tinto Brass – and the Science Fiction atmosphere, where Valentina becomes a guide by underground worlds, blind and antagonistic knights such as Modern. Valentina, the author’s alter ego, is also the mirror of a generation: emancipated and conscious woman, female icon and elegant seducers, able to absorb and bring the culture of an Italy between the 60s and the 1980s.

Parallel, the exhibition “Worlds, travel, stories … and then there is Jacovitti!“, Georganiseerd met het publiceren van de school in samenwerking met het Education Festival, herontdekt een burgerlijke erfgoed bestaande uit illustraties die tussen 1945 en de jaren 70 zijn gemaakt door Bruno Munari, Benito Jacovitti, Gianni de Luca en vele anderen. Ze zijn 73 werken geselecteerd door een archief van 120 duizend sketches en volumes in 2012 en in 2012 in 2012 en in 2012 in 2012 en in 2012 in 2012 en In 2012, the youth accompany the Italian republic, when the photos were rare and the images became educational vehicles that remained impressed in the collective memory.

«In our schedule – the director explains Stefano Karadjov, director of Brescia Musei Foundation – The illustration and images have always had space. These exhibitions tell the image of a country in transformation. ” For Francesca Bazoli, president of the Brescia Musei Foundation“Comics is an art of our time, capable of dialogue with cinema, music and other art, and cannot miss in a museum that houses 2500 years of history”, which repeats that the comic is no longer a suburb, but an essential part of contemporary visual culture.

For example, Brescia spends its autumn on some masters of the sign and the imaginative power of illustration. On the one hand, Crepax with its visual architectures that have transformed the strip into art; On the other hand, Jacovitti and his companions, preservators of a heritage who learned generations to look at and introduce you. Both exhibitions, interwoven dreams and stories, show a collective diary made of images that keep vibrating, how traces live between memory and future.

Guido Crepax, Valentina – De Lesmo -Curve1965, China Ink On Cardonic, Scheller, 36.5 x 51 cm © Crepax Archive