One could spend a long time wondering how many stages of existence can fit into the space of a blank page. As Georges Perec wrote with irony, praising the sheet of paper as a bed, echoing Marcel Proust’s famous opening line: «Long have I lain down in writing». In a not-too-distant spirit, illustrator Stefano Gardini (Forlimpopoli, 1984), known as Gardo, entrusts to drawing the task, light yet far from superficial, of recounting the faces and dynamics of everyday life through a line traced on paper.
In the chaos that seems to dictate the law over everything, spaces of encounter, beloved landscapes, and even the worn-out wheels of a bicycle become part of an aesthetic exuberance that leaves no gaps, preciously undecided and, at the same time, thoroughly modern. Fragments of lived experience, snapshots of feeling and glimpses of Rimini (which dialogue with the hand-worked elaboration of a previously taken photograph) mark the coordinates of a plunge into a world that, above all else, holds on to the need to be dialogue and generous curiosity toward the space of the other.
Gardo, whom the creative hand often gives back as a drawn alter ego, appears as the trickster (in Crow tradition, literally the divine rascal) protagonist, in spite of himself and with irony, of the small adventures that run through everyday life across the space of the page.
The expressiveness, an elegant and never excessive irony, together with a genuine dedication to observing reality, give back the way Gardo moves lightly through the events of everyday life, in line with what was Italo Calvino’s celebrated “American lecture” on the essence of lightness.
While summer brings out the series In giro per Rimini (2024), which sets itself apart by turning away from the sea views of the nightlife scene to instead capture the slow pace of the city’s symbolic gathering places, illustrations like 25 aprile (2024) and the more recent projects dedicated to neurodivergence offer emotion and strength to those who, every day, work to protect the most fragile petals of freedom.
And always keep growing a flower.
Article by Floriana Savino
