A trip to Iceland

Guido Scarabottolo, Viaggio in Islanda, La Grande Illusion, Pavia 2017. 64 pp.

  After Smarrimenti, bookstores are now welcoming a new artist’s book by Guido Scarabottolo for La Grande Illusion, a small publishing house based in Pavia but itinerant and cosmopolitan by nature, and dedicated to the production of tangible experiments lying between literature, illustration and graphics.

Viaggio in Islanda is a story without words, “the imaginary account of a trip to Iceland. It is attributed to Guido Scarabottolo, who has certainly never set foot in Iceland, based on a careful comparative examination of the illustrations”. It is a dreamlike and indecipherable naturalistic tale, a silent, metaphysical graphic novel.

  Scarabottolo himself explains the origins of the idea and how he realised it: “The concept sprang from the fake text and hand-drawn lines which, when I started working, were used while designing page layouts. First I sketched out the project for the whole volume in a notebook, and then, without diverging much from the annotated sequence, I did all the big drawings conceived as pages. The paper is Sicilian, even though it has the colour of snow. The ink is German, made for stamps. The brushes are mostly Chinese, but also Spanish or of uncertain origin due to their venerable age. The pencils, chalks and charcoal sticks also come from who knows where.”

The book’s 64 pages are packed with drawings, making a delight for the senses – sight, touch and smell. Conceived for refined connoisseurs of visual and graphic games. For lovers of Iceland. And, obviously, for fans of Scarabottolo, who trained as an architect but happily – and fortunately – “turned his hand” to illustration.