Fotokino

After studying at the Institute of Fine Arts in Urbino, Gianluigi Toccafondo started his painting career, following a technique that established him in the 1990s as one of the most essential animated film directors.

Almost invariably, Toccafondo uses pre-existing images as a medium for his films, and creates flowing forms on their surfaces which bear within them all the magic and poetry of movement. Color resurrects these images by working on their memory, manipulating and metamorphosing them. Over the past few years, using the same technique, he has also designed theatre and opera sets, created numerous posters and illustrated a large number of texts, often paying tribute through them to both popular and intellectual Italian culture. And thus pursuing a poetic dialogue between painting, literature and cinema.

For this exhibition, Gianluigi Toccafondo made a series of drawings illustrating various tales taken from Giambattista Basile’s volume entitled Lo Cunto de li cunti overo Lo Trattenemiento de peccerille (which in Neapolitan means “The Tale of Tales or The Entertainment of Children”). As with the book Cahier d’école—which we published when we first invited him to show his work in Marseilles in 2006—,he used torn magazine pages as his medium, covering them with acrylic paint in an instantaneous gesture that at times reveals indecipherable fragments of missing images.

This sixty or so drawings are complemented by three short films: La Coda (1989), La Pista (1991), Pinocchio (1999); two commissioned films: the one created for the 56th Venice Film Festival, and the credits for a documentary on the Neapolitan actor Totó. Three sets of silkscreen prints produced by the Bologna-based Squadro studio—a graphic research laboratory with which Toccafondo regularly collaborates—, as well as several original drawings from the films La Pista and Pinocchio are also on display.