“Wave - Tokyo Rockabilly” is a work by Ale Giorgini, an illustrator and designer from Vicenza, who has long established himself on the international stage with his unmistakable style. As he himself elaborated, his unique style “melds the lysergic and psychedelic aesthetics of 1970s illustration and cartoons with the precision and rigidity of geometric principles”. He points to significant formative influences, including Hanna-Barbera cartoons and the illustrated books of Miroslav Šašek on the one hand, and, on the other, his enrolment at a technical institute specialising in surveying during his schooling years. The title chosen for his solo exhibition held in Turin in 2018, “Geometricalismo”, is significant. Beyond the irony with which it evokes the manifestos of early 20th-century artistic avant-gardes, it recalls how the cornerstone of his expressive language is the construction of geometric shapes traced with essential marks.
Among the myriad of references that fuel his iconography, the culture of Japan holds a prominent place. He has had a strong interest in Japan for a long time, which has led him to create various illustrations set in Tokyo and to exhibit the results of a multimedia evolution in his works in this city twice (“Intervallo”, 2017, 2019). This multimedia evolution involves graphic interventions on photographs taken by himself. Giorgini, in fact, is among other things a “travel illustrator”, a curious narrator of places near and far, capturing their peculiarities in his own way. One of his series set in Japan, titled “Tokyo Rockabilly”, delves into one of the diverse subcultures thriving in the Japanese capital: rockabilly culture. This culture acts as a bridge between the Land of the Rising Sun and the mid-20th century American culture, which itself holds a prominent position in the artist’s creative imagination.
Just like another series dedicated to Japan (titled “Tokyo frames”), “Tokyo Rockabilly” frames human figures in the metropolitan environment, which is the typical context of any subculture. The illustration “Wave - Tokyo Rockabilly”, however, represents an exception in this sense. Here, we have a beach setting where Giorgini recontextualizes, paying homage to it, Hokusai’s most famous work, “The Great Wave off Kanagawa” (1830-31), an iconic piece of Japanese figurative art that Giorgini quite faithfully references.
However, with everything else, he takes playful liberties: Hokusai’s majestic woodblock print scene becomes an ordinary day at the beach; Mount Fuji disappears from the background, while Godzilla’s silhouette appears in the upper left; instead of fishing boats at the mercy of the gigantic wave, there’s a surfboard prudently held by the male figure. Instead of human faces (an element to which Giorgini’s illustrations normally devote a lot of space), what is emphasised here are the hairstyles, namely the 1950s pompadour of the male figure and the chignon of the female figure. Finally, whether intentionally or not, the bent legs of the seated woman create an unsettling element, a sort of mash-up between Hokusai and Giorgio de Chirico, as they resemble a lower limb of the famous “metaphysical” mannequins painted by the Italian artist.