Massimo Mattioli

Mattioli does not make comics, but cinema. However, it is not the cinema born with the Lumière, but with Edison. The great inventor did not create the cinematographer, but the cinematographer: a machine not suited to the many spectators gathered in the halls, but to the gaze of the individual. It was necessary to put a few coins in the slot of the machine and then lay the eye on the hole of the tool: a small film of a few minutes left surprising the consumer, usually a short comic or a low-cut film. Today the cinetoscope can only be seen in cinema museums and the Lumière, after winning in the economic history of the media, are everywhere remembered as the true inventors of the "magnificent obsession". The fulminating works of Mattioli instead give reason to Edison: another cinema would have been possible, delicate to the point of candor and violent as a serial massacre, available to a single user. And Mattioli brings, on the paper of the comics, a kinetoscopic revolution: with extreme aesthetic consistency, crosses siderially distant environments from each other - like the pages of the Giornalino also sold in churches and those of the despicable Cannibal and the icy Frigidaire, both born in alliance with Tamburini, Scozzari, Liberator and Pazienza - making them magically compatible. Mattioli sees the world populated by puppets, softer and sweeter set than those of Walt Disney and more fierce and ruthless characters Warner Bros. It makes them bright with exaggerated colors, bends them to every emphatic expression, makes them fall in love or hate by drawing heart-shaped eyes or destroying noses in blenders. How does it do? Powerful humour blows on every table, also unfortunately a minority on our planet: it is the wind of delirium and the impossible, where the deeds of Fritz the Cat and Animal House echo, where it happens that a small cactus sings out loud unbearable songs and where the Flash Gordon of the kinetoscope, such Joe Galaxy, risks his life just for the sake of lighting a cigarette to a six-armed monster from who knows where. Respecting the scan of the short format, sometimes very short, and yet - simply turning the page, the equivalent of inserting the coin in the kinetoscope - makes it start again its carousel and its stories. Sailing towards sensory distortion and dissociation between spectacular machines and masses, Mattioli recreates a world to the size of an extremist brain, the one that allows us to forget that the cinema has won and that redesigns in the viewer’s neurons the ecstasy and the atrocity of the only human mind that cannot be blamed for madness: that of children. Very sweet and very bad and, above all, forever.