“The Art of Improvisation” is an illustration created in 2016 by Emiliano Ponzi for the German edition of the magazine “Geo”. It was published alongside other images under the same title. Each of these images features a person who transforms an ordinary situation (such as a horseback riding session or a walk with dogs) into a highly unusual scene through the adoption of imaginative solutions.
In this case, the protagonist is an elderly man in a blue shirt who is navigating through a garden that forms a labyrinth of low, curvilinear hedges meticulously trimmed, interspersed with palm trees. Instead of patiently following the regular path, this individual literally “pulls straight” by mowing a straight line with a lawnmower, a gesture that allows him to swiftly advance towards the centre of the maze. Whatever symbolic value one may want to attribute to it, the labyrinth always evokes something complex, a challenge of sorts, a problem to solve. Here, therefore, improvisation seems to involve an action that, by breaking the convoluted circuit imposed by conventions, accelerates the arrival at the heart of an issue, radically altering its terms.
While not lacking irony, this illustration is not merely an exercise in style, nor a cleverness its own sake, nor a pretext to elicit a smile. Beyond the specific theme it addresses, it can be seen as an exemplary case of how a certain type of illustrators take abstract concepts and make them visible through concise storytelling, composed of immediately recognizable metaphors and symbols, while still leaving room for interpretation. Here, the symbolic power of the labyrinth, culturally significant, is used to stage the metaphor of its arbitrary crossing – unorthodox, destructively prosaic – by someone who isn’t too concerned about subtlety. We can’t truly know whether it is a good or bad thing to freely violate the ordered vegetal maze, whatever it might symbolise.
What is certain, however, is that such an impromptu process is entirely different from the way in which the author creates his works. Meticulous, attentive, a perfectionist, and a declared enemy of superficiality, Ponzi (born in Reggio Emilia in 1978, raised in Ferrara and educated in Milan, where he still lives and works) would traverse the entire labyrinth multiple times rather than seek easy shortcuts. It is also thanks to this rigour that he has long been one of the most highly regarded illustrators worldwide, an artist capable of combining his talent for the concise and poetic expression of complex concepts with a formal exploration based on precision and the diversity of language.