Cinema and comics have always been a real factory of dreams. Since their development in the 20th century, they have had a fundamental role in the reflection and reinvention of the world as we know it today. There is a comic version of the life and nearly legendary story of Salvatore Ferragamo, created on the occasion of the exhibition The Amazing Shoemaker from one of the greatest comic artists of our time, Frank Espinosa who, coincidentally, was the son of cobbler.
The technique adopted by the artist to realize the comic story on Salvatore’s life, integrates, as he himself states, different elements of a collage, “sewing” them in images just as a shoemaker sews together the upper and the sole. In the story, Espinosa has purposefully maintained a slight sense of “messiness” so as to portray the atmosphere of an actual shoe factory. These details succeed to create a tactile and emotional ecstasy, sparks emitted thanks to the art born from human determination and the bond between the hand and its creation, in a union of the craftsman who created the work and whomever will finally behold it.
Salvatore despised machinery and anonymous mass production. “He loved reality and making things”, Espinosa affirms, the ghost of reality was the vast canvas on which he could create. So, a colorful fish becomes the material in the realization of fashionable shoes, while scrap materials or industrial surplus were transformed into intuitions of elegance and objects of desire.
Frank Espinosa, Salvatore Ferragamo. Making of a Dream, 2013.
Text and drawings, 26 plates and colour cover. Mixed media (acrylic/gouache on pencil and India ink) on paper, 36 x 43 cm each. Translation by Andrea Plazzi. Editorial coordination and supervision by Symmaceo Communications, graphic adaptation by Alessio d’Uva.
© 2013 Salvatore Ferragamo S.p.A.
