Author:
Lorenzo Mattotti
Publishing house:
Logos
Date of publication:
26-10-2020
The protagonist of this poetic and hallucinatory comic strip, with the evocative name Spartacus, is a kind of futurist scientist of the early twentieth century, an elegant, quiet, and somewhat shy man who leaves one day by train to visit his aunt. Soon he falls asleep and begins to dream as the unconscious gradually takes over. Thus, what could be an ordinary journey loses its spatio-temporal boundaries by welcoming the incursions of a series of surreal characters, such as the Doctor or Mister Blue, and continually erupting into dreamlike visions that reenact episodes of the protagonist’s life, from childhood to adulthood, in Italy at the turn of the 1950s and 1980s. Spartacus, as the subtitle suggests, thus becomes the epicenter of a series of inner earthquakes that cause him to constantly oscillate between past and present, dream and reality, and ultimately between life and death.
A turning point work in the artist’s career, Mr. Spartacus anticipates several themes of the Mattotti to come, such as dreaming, remembrance, the descent into the abysses of the human soul and the trauma of the farewell to childhood and adolescence, which is followed by the conquest of light. In this sense, the train ride turns into a symbolic test of initiation into adult life. Making use of a mixed technique – pastels and markers – the artist visually represents the whirlwind – or earthquake – of the protagonist’s unconscious through a futurist-like plastic dynamism and a kaleidoscope of dazzling colors that at times seem to want to come out of the panels, while the allusive, often rhyming texts similarly take us back to the beginning of the last century, and in particular to the rhymed comic strips of the Corriere dei Piccoli.