Prior to being incorporated into our collection, this drawing was displayed in Grottammare during the “Segni Fo” exhibition, curated in 1998 by Vincenzo Mollica. This exhibition had the aim of celebrating Dario Fo (Sangiano, 1926 - Milan, 2016), the renowned playwright, actor and activist who had been honoured with the Nobel Prize in Literature the previous year. The event brought together works dedicated to him by several prominent Italian illustrators, as well as drawings created by Fo himself, whose cultural and expressive repertoire also encompassed painting.
For decades, Tanino Liberatore, the author behind the portrait, has been a prominent figure in the international art scene, known for the fullness and sensuality of the bodies he draws. An adopted Parisian (born in 1956 in Quadri, Abruzzo, and living in Paris since 1982), Liberatore played a significant role at the beginning of his career in the cultural ferment that swept through Italy in the 1970s. This era was a fertile ground for a brief yet intense creative season, yielding highly innovative results. Part of this innovation was carried forward through an experimental use of comics in various brilliant satirical magazines, such as “Cannibale”, “Alter Alter”, “Frigidaire” and “Valvoline”.
His reputation as a comic book artist, acquired almost against his will (as the artist himself claims to have never had the required patience to create serialised visual narratives), is primarily based on a character created in 1978 by Stefano Tamburini, “RanXerox”, which was visually developed by Liberatore and has remained one of his most iconic images. This violent and vulgar cyborg, operating in dystopian urban scenarios and named after being assembled from parts of a photocopier, quickly emancipated itself from the comic strips in which it was the protagonist, becoming an autonomous figure adaptable to different contexts. The most notable reimagining of the RanXerox persona can be found on the cover of an album by Frank Zappa, “The Man from Utopia” (1983), where the American musician is portrayed with hyper-accentuated muscles, bestial features, and the assertive posture characteristic of Liberatore’s android.
Similar is the treatment given to Dario Fo in this pencil portrait: akin to the “synthetic thug” RanXerox, the Italian playwright here takes on a vehement appearance, with a hypertrophic chest, Herculean arms, “Michelangelo-esque” hands, and the characteristic onomatopoeia (“ZNÓRT”). The portrait is thus an ironic and affectionate celebration of the inexhaustible vitality of the multifaceted author and performer, to whom Liberatore adds two more attributes, this time external to his creative world. The first attribute is the star drawn on the chest, a reference to the world of comic book superheroes, particularly the character of Captain America, created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby in 1941. This tireless fighter, originally a humble art student, uses his superpowers to defend democracy and the rights of others, somewhat in the manner of Dario Fo. The second element is the jester’s hat, a symbol that refers to Fo’s well-known explorations of language, storytelling and medieval popular culture, of which “Mistero buffo” (1969) is the most renowned result. It was precisely these theatrical explorations that constituted the main reason behind the decision to award him the Nobel Prize: “following the tradition of medieval jesters”, as stated in the official motivation by the Swedish Academy, Dario Fo “ridicules power, restoring dignity to the oppressed”.