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DANTE’S INFERNO


Inferno di Emiliano Ponzi per “Un Sedicesimo” edizioni Corraini /  Buy online

In the “Sedicesimo” n° 28 , just issued by Edizioni Corraini the sharpest stroke of Emiliano Ponzi’s last work is the idea of exploring the Hell through the filter of contemporaneity and universal icons, to revisit by flashes Dante’s Inferno circles.
 
Dante’s “sleep” procedes in Ponzi’s narration by visions.
Daily nightmares drown in the flat background colours of each image.
A suffocating uniformity of colours cutting the ribbon of time and freezing the figures in the eternity of punishment.
The pop iconography descends to the netherworld and amends its sins.
The language remains the one that made Ponzi one of the most valued illustrators worldwide.
In the “Sedicesimo Inferno” Ponzi creates a “punishment of colour” that kneads and washes the human feature of the damned in which it only emerges the identity of their role in society or history e. It’s the case of the “Choleric” in which the married couple manifests itself only in the “wedding gown” destroyed by the flames of anger that burn thinking about an undesirable strangling marital life.
And so the creative technique continues similarly in the circle of the Homicides and Tyranns. The intense red of the river of blood soaks the image completely and wets the silhouette of Hilter frozen in the iconic act of an imperialist swim.
In the circle devoted to the Traiters the infernal red, on a double page, becomes the instrument of punishment and mean of accusation.
On one side of the street two prostitutes negotiating the service with a client in a car.
The scene is still, universal, immediate till when the eye is catched by the small white dot of the clergyman worn by the man driving the car.
It is evident in this image all the expertise of Ponzi as a Visual designer, the skill to sinthetize the act of communication in the minimal possible sign in which all the creative power is condensed.
The presence of both eternal and contemporary pop, like for instance the cinematographic “fatman” trapped in a popsicle (the Greedy), gets its peak in the Limbo.
A blind guided by his dog under a cloudy sky broken in the center by a powerful geometric sun.
The image of the dammed, the blind, does not raise from the background colour, but it is part of the punishment of the colour, but the daily, familiar, iconic, presence of the dog as a guide, gives a shade of compassion to the scene.
Very subtle feeling told with surgeon technique of sign and composition.
“Inferno” is the 28th “Sedicesimo” of the prestigious book series of edizioni Corraini that hosted the most important signatures of art, design and communication, such as
Steven Heller, Frank Chimero, Steven Guarnaccia, Italo Lupi and Giulio Iacchetti.