The city of Pordenone, located in the Italian northeastern region of Friuli is home to a large and recently established comics museum (born in 2018 in a park in the city centre), the PAFF! International Museum of Comic Art, whose artistic director is comics journalist and historian Luca Raffaelli. The museum is located in a park in the center of Pordenone, a city with about 50,000 inhabitants not far from Venice, surmounted by the Alpi, a beautiful and quiet small city. In addition to its permanent collection - so gorgeously assembled and displayed it would deserve a whole separate article – the building regularly hosts large exhibitions. Last spring a truly huge one was dedicated to the work of Chris Ware.
Chris Ware – La prospettiva della memoria (“Chris Ware – The perspective of memory”) opened on March 9 and closed on May 12, and I was lucky enough to visit it on its last day (not lucky enough to be there for the opening day, when Ware was a guest). This was not the first Ware exhibition in Italy in recent years – the first one in the country was curated by Associazione Hamelin in Bologna during the tenth edition of BiBOlBul festival in 2016. But the one at PAFF sure enough was the larger one in Italy, and most certainly the largest in Europe. Chris Ware – La prospettiva della memoria was in fact based on the Basel (Switzerland) Cartoon Museum exhibition from last year titled "Paper Life," and took advantage of a larger space – two floors for for a total of 6500 square feet in the three-story villa of that hosts PAFF.
Chris Ware – La prospettiva della memoria was curated by Raffaelli and journalist and writer Valerio Bindi (one of the most respected agitators of the contemporary European comics underground scene, and curator of the alternative comics happening Crack! Festival in Rome).
The exhibition hosted comics pages from all of Ware's major works; starting with Jimmy Corrigan, and going through Building Stories, Rusty Brown and Quimby the Mouse, as well as short stories, and several New Yorker cover illustrations. Even though being in front of Ware’s huge comics pages is always an astonishing experience, in that location and that set-up, the one thing that was even more astonishing was how every wall was decorated, covered with patterns of colors and shapes, details, round boards hanging from the high ceiling of the first floor that hosted the mostra, ehm, show. (Yes, the Italian word for exhibition is “mostra”, which sounds almost like “monster”, and while everything there was anything but ugly, this sure was a gigantic and impressive show.)
"This exhibition was conceived as a conceptual reservoir, which has taken different configurations over time. Angouleme, Paris, Basel, and Pordenone. Each time the curators have re-discussed the themes and reconfigured the project," co-curator Bindi explained.
"In Pordenone, the work was perhaps the most complex; the museum space itself was reinterpreted, in constant collaboration with Ware, to find the balance between all the elements and their right sequence. The exhibition is a living thing to and from which you continually add and subtract pieces, with the aim of finding the best configuration for all its different segments. This was the most interesting task for us. And in this work of recombination we found new meanings and ways of reading the work of the artist. We have focused on the feelings that characterize Ware's comics, the strong emotional impact that linear forms manage to communicate by warping the rhythm between image and text. And also by building an intimate communication with the reader," Bindi said.
"The exhibition was designed both in a thematic and chronological order, based on the author's major themes. The production of the books, the graphic novels, the relationship with architecture, the covers, the memory of ragtime, and a path that follows Ware's pedagogical work, the narrative on making comics," he said. "The title Perspective of Memory was precisely a reflection on this act of retracing the memory of his works, as well as a meditation on the meaning of memory in Ware’s work. Ware has repeated several times that if reality is perceived in perspective, axonometric representation is the right form to reconstruct the perception of memory. These are the two elements on which the artist’s work is based."
The curators worked in a "constant spirit of collaboration" with Ware, Bindi said. "The physical distance in the early planning stage was erased by his incredible ability to immerse himself in all thoughts and ideas we’d propose to him, sometimes by reorienting them or by new interpretations in our suggestions. He is tireless. Punctual. Accurate. Passionate. Steady. He is helpful. And the ideas he has about his work are very clear."
The room dedicated to Building Stories was possibly the most fascinating area of the show. A large column was covered to look like the eponymous building, and a truly huge little baby from the book looked at you from a wall. The light did not help me, so the picture does not make justice of how beautiful she looked.
The first two areas on the first floor were connected. At the beginning you see images on the walls, boards, pages, memorabilia, toys, and a mock-up book of Jimmy Corrigan, then Building Stories or the New Yorker covers, in a possibly never-ending circle. Then you’d find a narrow staircase leading to the underground floor, where, with less illumination, was displayed a wide selection of pages from Rusty Brown, especially from the story of Joanne Cole. A room was also dedicated to Quimby the Mouse and other short stories as well.
Emerging back to the ground floor, to the same point where the exhibition started, now watching the same round boards on their other side, was just an invitation to start over again.
I should let the pictures talk. Yet I am aware that the gorgeousness of Mr. Ware’s comics pages cannot be encapsulated in my camera’s small lenses. There is something that could be seen from a distance, an elaborated layout, next to a much simpler one in another page. Then there were countless details, annotations on the side that go deeper and deeper into the image and into the lives of the characters. And there are the blue lines – outlines or maybe color indications – light strokes that in Ware’s original art, which in the end are so precise and clean in the printed final version, give a sense of movement, of vitality and vibrance.
This is what Ware's comics are about, and what became particularly clear with Building Stories: his idea of a whole and his dedication to the smaller details that go deep into every human and non-human aspect of the picture.
Hosted in a museum that is an integral part of a small city, the exhibition was precisely focused on bringing Ware’s work to an average visitor (during my visit I saw both foreign tourists and locals) while at the same time providing thorough research on the artist's work, one that would satisfy those who know his work well and even those who had previously seen his art in person.
An exhibition catalogue was published by PAFF (in Italian and English) featuring reproductions of the approximately 200 works on display and a large section of critical contributions by Italian and European comics scholars, including – along with the two co-curators – Benoît Peeters, who wrote on the redesigning of the boundaries of comics in Ware’s work; Benoît Crucifix, on the relationship with memory and archives; Nina Eckhoff-Heindl, on the relationship between tactility and play; Lorenzo Di Paola, on the rhizomatic structure of narration; and Enrique Bordes, on visual, spatial and urban narrative. Raffaelli, meanwhile, developed a theory on memory and narrative flow in Ware’s work, Marco Dabbà wrote a reflection on polyphony, and Bindi on the changing structure and disconnection in Ware’s work.
What I saw at Chris Ware – La prospettiva della memoria was something I had rarely – or maybe never – seen before in a comics exhibition. It was not the sheer and touching beauty of Daniel Clowes' art exhibition at the 2011 Fumetto Festival in Lucerna, Switzerland, nor the sharp and dazzling accuracy of the Charles Burns show at the 2009 BilBOlBul Festival in Bologna, Italy, just two name two exhibitions that has impressed me in the past. The Ware retrospective in Pordenone was so complete, intense, extensive and embracing that I don’t know if I will ever experience anything like it soon. With Chris Ware – La prospettiva della memoria and other shows as well, PAFF is establishing itself as a one of Europe’s most prominent outlets when it comes to comics exhibitions.
The post When Chris Ware came to Italy: A look at the PAFF! exhibition in Pordenone appeared first on The Comics Journal.
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