Inanimate and dark objects that come to life, the themes always have a macabre, magical and disturbing aspect, the ‘stop-motion’ technique for Stefano Bessoni is “the black soul of animation”. The artist is the protagonist at ‘Cartoons On The Bay’ with the exhibition ‘Stefano Bessoni. Stop-motion and other inexact sciences” edited by Lorenza Fruci. Film director, writer, illustrator and animator, Bessoni sinks his poetics in the concept of Wunderkammer, the “chambers of wonders”, a genre that feeds on reproductions of environments with gothic and mysterious stories. The exhibition, open to the public at the Aurum in Pescara until June 1st, is a journey into the artist’s imagination.
The comparison with Tim Burton
“With these projects, drawings and my puppets – says the artist – I wanted to make my expressive inner world known which I have been carrying out for many years. The stop-motion technique remained somewhat in the shadows, it became important thanks to Tim Burton. It may seem disturbing, because this art moves real inanimate objects, I would define it as the black soul of animation, stories that are basically romantic and macabre in the nineteenth-century sense of the term are told”.
According to Bessoni, however, “in Italy this technique is little exploited. It is almost commonplace, when talking about this genre, to immediately think of Tim Burton, as if only he could do it. Then, when you try to launch a similar project in Italy, they tell you that only Tim Burton can do it, that it can be done abroad but not here. There are always budget issues.” Perhaps, underlines the artist, “it is time to recognize that, thanks to Tim Burton, stop motion animation and this macabre but poetic world linked to diversity have been opened to many other authors around the world. Even if we cannot have Hollywood budgets, we should consider producing smaller, more artisanal works. Being compared to Tim Burton on the one hand honors me, on the other it makes me a little bitter“. “Working on Stefano Bessoni’s works was an intriguing challenge, given the complexity of his work”, comments Lorenza Fruci who first underlines “the attention we wanted to give to stop motion, a particular expressive language and not very widespread. We have chosen to illustrate the creative process from the initial conception, through the script, to the final editing. It was fascinating to show how an idea turns into sketches and then into a film, through composition and puppet animation.”
This, according to Fruci, “represents an important value for the Festival: telling a language which, although it is often associated with children, is also used effectively to narrate stories intended for an adult audience“. Another aspect investigated in this exhibition, says Fruci, “it is its educational potential. Bessoni, with his gothic and at times macabre imagery, invites us to see beyond appearances. This narrative leads us to confront the different, the different that initially scares us or seems repellent. However, once we explore it more deeply, we discover that it contains a wealth of humanity and poetry that would otherwise have remained unknown to us.”
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