7/26/2016-8/20/2016-public library "Tartarotti" in Rovereto
The exhibition is devoted to the work of cartoonist and humorist Joseph Novello, through the hilarious, merciless and caustic portraits of the bourgeoisie of the "Bel paese", between the years of fascist heyday and those immediately following the second after war.
"There are at least three good reasons for an exhibition dedicated to the designs of Joseph Novello. The first is that today, the name of the formidable artist Codogno, despite the great popularity he had to enjoy in the past, is now unknown to most people. The second is that these boards are fun, damn funny: pure entertainment in china black on white sheet. But there is a third reason and is perhaps what makes this exhibition so urgently: how funny, those drawings and those characters in them portraits, are still a loyal stainless which each of us could and can rammaticamente be reflected and recognize each other. With a variable amount of embarrassment and discomfort, because that small and medium bourgeoisie depicted by Novello, especially the one described in the 1930s, the fascist heyday and after the war, it was by no means extinct, but continued to thrive, developing antibodies even more resistant to all the vain hope of improvement and ransom.
The Italian people, less than a century, it never redeemed, but he always remained faithful to himself, continuing to pull a living, decade after decade, practicing with unparalleled skill as much the art of resilience as the game of gattopardism. The pettiness of the opportunism, the hypocrisy, the conformism, vanity, cowardice, selfishness, the tics more Novel odiosiche accused some of his countrymen (and even to himself, not claiming never to back out or be unconnected to its J'accuse) are exactly those that we struggle to grasp every day not looking around. Or of course, directly to the mirror.
Therefore, watching and reading Novel tables today, more than seventy years after their initial release, means living a dual experience as far as alienating, remarkably funny and sincere dismay. «Attention» seemed to suggest then Novello "here we laugh, but there is nothing to laugh about. It's serious, very serious, as much as I do find Comique: there is a dictatorship, a crazy and bloodthirsty colonial adventure in progress, there are the racial laws, there will be a war: pulls a very bad air and we're getting used to living with the horror, we're adapting to let us slip on.
We walk on the edge of a precipice and nobody seems to want to account. " «Attention» continue to suggeririrci these portraits of awkward and funny gentlemen of good family "today these cartoons are still laugh and maybe now as then, we adapt to hang out with his feet on the edge of the precipice, in wretched waiting step too many that will plunge." That no deception so the temporal distance that separates us from them before publication and will not confuse the fact that the targets of its satire appears to belong to an ancient and distant world, scatter a misunderstanding garbo gozzaniano. Above all, let us not fall into the same trap that Novello had to develop to express her concern without causing suspicion among the censors of a regime that soon he would have knocked on the Russian front to fight, after the first, his second world war. " (Michele Pompeii)
Source: www.cultura.trentino.it