Giorgio Carpinteri's 'Pop Eye' Anthology Revives 1980s Valvolinic Comics

Giorgio Carpinteri (Bologna, 1958) is the subject of a new anthology 'Pop Eye' published by Oblomov (Quartu Sant'Elena, 2017, 96 pages, €12, ISBN 9788885621121). Carpinteri was a member of the 'valvolinici' group of Italian comic artists active in the 1980s, whose main model was Futurism but also drew from Russian Constructivism, German Expressionism (Grosz, Dix), Art Déco, Cubism, and Fauvism. After this brief intense period, Carpinteri left comics for a career in television and advertising art direction. The anthology collects four short stories from that era: two in color, one in black and white (where grays are formed by dense hatching of the word 'ombra'), and one posthumously colored in chrome and lemon yellows. The style is characterized by rhythmic visual musicality, angular choreography, jazz-like distortions, anomalous scenic taste, narrative nonchalance, and ironic detachment. The book's format is an unusual narrow horizontal strip. The review is by Ferruccio Giromini (Genoa, 1954), a journalist, critic, and image historian since 1978, who has worked as a photographer, illustrator, screenwriter, and television director, and exhibited at the 1980 Venice Biennale.