There was something different in the air at Lake Como Comic Art Festival this year.
Stories seemed to flow freely, spilling out of everyone I met. In the booths, in the corridors, out in the streets, even over breakfast… everywhere I went, someone had a story, and often enough, about Massimiliano Frezzato. Not just tributes, not just "he was a great artist", but real, living stories… tender, messy, human….
Through all of this I met some wonderful people, who introduced me to other wonderful people, and eventually the conversations led me to this piece.
This is an original page from L'immortale, created by Frezzato in 2012. It is part of a portfolio so rare that, ironically, I have never actually laid eyes on it. I know it was published by Little Nemo in 2013 and that it contained seventeen illustrations. And that somehow, miraculously, this one has found its way into my hands.
There is precious little information left online about this project. The only real description I could still trace was an excerpt from the artist's blog [now largely vanished ] which I found in a gallery catalogue. From there, I followed the trail to a more complete archive that I had to carefully scrape out of old Wayback Machine snapshots.
Here is the main description, translated from the original Italian. [This is mostly a machine translation; my Italian is not good enough to take this on myself. If anyone is interested in the original text, or in my Wayback Machine scraps, let me know.]
“When we were children, my mother often took us to visit a cousin who worked as a scrap dealer. Authorized by the local parish, he had been granted free access to a large number of houses and cellars in what was then well-to-do Turin. In the courtyard of what had once been a farmhouse, clothes, furniture, toys, books, household appliances were piled up — all the discards of early consumerism — waiting, in the rain and under the sun, for someone to come and give them new social opportunities.
Next to my cousin’s office there was the ‘vault.’ A small locked shed for the most precious items, selected for himself or for friends, forbidden to the eyes of others. A single empty cube that looked like the storehouse of a poor man’s Scrooge McDuck.
Strengthened by our family connection, my mother, my brother and I would spend entire afternoons in there. Each of us conquering our own hill. Not much remains to me from that time; over the years my treasure consisted of an old briefcase and a handwritten book of inorganic chemistry.
In September of last year I received a parcel from home, the kind mothers send to clear space and awaken the guilt of children living far away. Besides the little curtains for the caravan, there were the first three Junior Woodchucks manuals and the aforementioned book.
Leafing through it, ready to put it back on the shelf for another twenty years, I noticed that some pages had faded and, in place of the original symbols, other things could be glimpsed. A text. Strange and apparently disconnected in its elements. Written in different languages and scripts. Many passages are illegible and I preferred not to interpret them.
I do not know whether the author is what he claims to be, nor whether he still exists or might be reading me. I immersed myself for a year in his work, with results that to this day I consider merely sketched. I therefore apologise to him and to the reader for having brought to print only a partial interpretation of something so vast that, perhaps as in the text itself, it does not imply an end.”
I have only ever caught glimpses of the portfolio through scattered photographs and a couple of interviews, but even seen second-hand, the illustrations and concepts seem extraordinary—and this piece, in person, is phenomenal.
My sincerest thanks to Vanni Varalda and Claudio Campanini who made it possible for this piece to travel across time and space and end up here with me.
