Signs of Man
6456 Alberto Martini
Illustratore di Edgar Allan Poe
Alberto Martini. Edited by Marco Lorandi. Texts by Julio Cortázar, Roberto Tassi, Marco Lorandi
1984 / 280 PAGES.
Language: Italian edition
A standout moment in Alberto Martini’s artistic life was his introduction to Edgar Allan Poe’s stories; a reading that spurred him to map out the figurative paraphrase of those unsettling literary fictions.
Alberto Martini’s introduction to Poe’s stories proved both enlightening and successful. At the start of the 20th century, in reading Poe’s stories translated by Baudelaire, Martini was struck by a “strange feeling”, and thus decided to map out a figurative paraphrase of those feelings with his subtle pen strokes. Poe’s mind was ruled not by the spirit of horror or perversity but, rather, by the spirit of exaggeration. Any idea, event, pain or image, when exaggerated, immediately takes us beyond the realm of morality, truth and reality. And this transgression led Poe to another truth, another dimension, another type of poetry. Martini follows Poe’s literature in the same spirit, tasking his own hand and drawings to visually translate – into small and large-scale illustrations – these daydreams and visions which, together, make up a sort of alphabet of fear and desire.