Detail of a coloured panel by Igort at the exhibition ‘Il Muschio e la Carne. Anatomia dei sensi nel Giappone di Igort’ for the ‘Project Room’ of the ‘Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea’/ PAC in Milan at the event ‘Japan. Body_Perform_Live’,  at care of Shihoko Iida and Diego Sileo (2022, November 22 – 2023, February 12).

‘Blue’ is, in English language, the colour of a melancholic, and somewhat hostile, resignation. But somewhere else it is the colour which favours the step, the beginning of a movement : is this ‘the zone’ from where Igort knows how to never leave it ?

You fool yourself when thinking that you can talk and draw at the same time, or that you can play and talk too, at worst when you pretend to talk while you are eating, and so you leave the zone. But you can listen while you colour or you carry out what you already planned, and so you don’t leave the zone where you produce something that will not be a ‘déjà vu’, even better if you listen to yourself when you speak : and then, someone who takes care of you would never ask you to do two things at the same time, not even if you were a child.

You can listen when you repair a toy, also when you are eating you listen, and when you press the tip of the pencil onto the paper : but you can’t listen when you’re watching a movie, or when you keep an eye on your smartphone, because at that moment – and only then – your brain just grasps, shades of the words around, and even of the lowest and most humiliating speeches what remains to you is in the ‘aura’ of imagination which is, as we know, manoeuvrable.

I’ve thought that the books and the panel pages by Igort are for children and are for adults, but they are not for adolescence : a child accepts difficulties, even the partner’s shortcomings when they remain suspended, something clearly not definitive, indeed it is precisely the children who offer to the partner who has missed, a new chance.

That was already the universe of Grimm Brothers who succeeded, at the beginning of XIX century for a perhaps nationalistic yet democratic intent, to transfer to children the same difficult stories that adults told each other verbally in front of the fireplace.

Listening is feared in adolescence, it was immediately contested, the sign that does not belong is chased away, they comment on it compulsively as a stumbling block and an obstacle, adolescence suffers from a long illusion, the hard core of Culture.

The universe of Igort doesn’t seem to know the traditional separation, there are not two universes, one female and one male : here we are interested in the fact that when women can be criticized or appreciated just as much as men, they rarely become the object of aggression that is gender, verbal or non-verbal.

The female universe is an abstraction because there is, for example, a graphic pleasure that does not know the differences of sex : and the graphics of the night dreams, although visual, are a case of living work of the sleeping subject who reports and judges reality adequately.

I will therefore come again to this author later.

Marina Bilotta Membretti / Cernusco sul Naviglio – November 3, 2023

[1] Master of the graphic novel and illustrator, screenwriter, director, musician, Igor Tuveri – or Igort – is born in 1958 at Cagliari : he starts in Bologna, and he publishes already at the end of 1970s. His first solo album is released in 1980, published by Italian Records and entitled ‘Radetzky e gli isotopi’; now he is a regular collaborator of Linus, Frigidaire, Alter Alter, L’echo des Savanes, Vanity e The Face. In 1983 he is among the founders of Valvoline, a few years later he is in Paris with Metal Hurlant, among whose founders is Moebius. In the 90s he moves to Tokyo, where since 1991 he begins a collaboration with the publishing house Kodansha, which will last fifteen years. In 2000 he is co-founder with Carlo Barbieri of the publishing house Coconino Press. In 2002 he publishes ‘5 è il numero perfetto’, which in 2003 wins the award for the best book of the year at the ‘Bookfair’ of Frankfurt and which in 2019 becomes a movie starring – among others - Toni Servillo, Valeria Golino, Carlo Buccirosso, directed and dramatized by Igort : it is previewed at the Festival of Venice, and then presented at several other international Festivals. Again with ‘Coconino Press’ Igort publishes ‘Fats Waller’. Then the series ‘Baobab’ starts. In 2010 he already lived in Ukraine and in Russia, and with Mondadori he publishes ‘Quaderni ucraini’, to which ‘Quaderni russi’ follows and in 2014 ‘Quaderni giapponesi’. In 2017 he announces he is leaving ‘Coconino Press’ and so ‘Quaderni giapponesi’-vol.2 comes out for ‘Oblomov Edizioni’ : in 2018 he receives the audience award at the ‘Biografilm Festival’ of Bologna. Again in 2018 he is appointed director of Linus. In 2019 ‘Quaderni giapponesi’ are shown at the British Museum at the exhibition about ‘manga’ at care of Paul Gravett. In 2023 (May-September) the exhibition ‘Igort. Attraversare le forme’ is presented at Pisa, ‘Palazzo Blu’.