Exile in the Everyday—The Lyric Resistance of Iranian-American Poet Solmaz Sharif
The book cover features the first photograph ever taken in the world. Its significance lies not in what it shows, but in the birth of the ability to preserve what we see. The blurriness of that image is not a mistake, but the technical limit of early cameras and development processes. Limits are the only conditions we can rely on in the present—and they are also the source of freedom.
Is that blurriness akin to our first glance at anything? A metaphor for the limits of our preservation? Is that blur the perpetual distance between us and the essence of things? No matter how confident we are in our gaze, is seeing always the impossibility of full representation? At the top of the photo are a pair of eyes—two holes in the book title LOOK. If that photo marks the first time humankind saw with something other than their own eyes, then Solmaz Sharif invites us to look through hers. To see the unclear.
But what does she ask us to look at? From the title of her first collection Look (2016), Solmaz opens with a line that strikes at the core: “It matters what you call a thing.” In other words, no phenomenon or event is purely objective. How we name and perceive it determines what it is and what fate it will meet. What a thing is matters less than how our looking defines its relation to us.
In “Look,” she portrays a man labeled “criminal” by the state in the 16 seconds before his death—before the missile passes through clouds, lands on his roof, and explodes him. The state’s layered surveillance and violence reduce both his intimacy and insignificance to data. He becomes nothing—erased, disregarded.
In an interview with The Paris Review, Solmaz said: “To be a woman is also to know that your body and yourself and your mind are subject to and delimited by power at every turn… even in your own house, in your own lovemaking... When you’re told that you’re overreacting, that what you think is going on isn’t actually happening—this is how the U.S. largely deals with warfare. I want to talk about how far-reaching these effects are… how intimate… how there’s no part of our bodies or desires not somehow informed or violated by these atrocities.”
In "Look", Solmaz appropriates terms from the U.S. Department of Defense Dictionary—DESTROYED, DIRECT ILLUMINATION, MISSING, WEAPON, THERMAL SHADOW, LOOK—and places them in detailed, intimate scenes. She interrogates how these words infiltrate the everyday, how daily life reflects atrocities and war. How are facts and truth framed? How is violence scripted through language? Where lies the legitimacy of U.S. intervention in the Middle East? The poem ends without mockery or rage:
Let it matter what we call a thing.
Let it be the exquisite face for at least 16 seconds.
Let me LOOK at you.
Let me LOOK at you in a light that takes years to get here.
Solmaz asks us to witness a man unjustly condemned—to hold his gaze in the moment before death, not to change his fate, but to confront atrocity without hatred, to answer “America” with a gaze free of injury. Looking becomes a weaponless act of resistance.
If “Look at you the way you look at me” is a kind of lucid resistance, then “Let me LOOK at you in a light that takes years to get here” is a reflexive blessing: I know you cannot see me now, because you must not see me in order to kill me. Years later, your gaze will illuminate your own past—not to see me, but to see yourself. Let my existence recede; let me fulfill your blindness. The meaning of seeing is not to save me now, but to wait for the future you. What you need is not my forgiveness, but to wake up and see yourself clearly.
Solmaz wants us to see the dignity in facing violence, the life choices on the line of death. The entire collection Look depicts her and her family’s fractured life in exile. She says: “I always follow my fear, so I make myself go toward the thing I’m afraid of.” She wants us to realize that what we see happening “there” has already happened “here.” "The Reaching Guantánamo" series presents several letters sent by relatives to prisoners in overseas prisons, with their contents heavily redacted:
Dear Salim,
said I need to
my tongue. It’s getting sharp.
I told him to his own
business, to his own
wife. He didn’t .
If he wasn’t my
I would never
again. Sometimes, I write you
letters I don’t send. I don’t mean
to cause alarm. I just want the ones
you open to
like a hill of poppies.
Yours,
Hollowing out language, leaving mutilated messages that are illegible and illogical silences. Important messages are deleted, irrelevant ones remain. This erases the meaning of a letter, erases the relationship between sender and receiver, erases the prisoner’s history and autonomy, and exposes the authoritarian power of the rulers. Surveillance and erasure are a form of psychic violence and a tactic of domination. Is "Reaching Guantánamo" an art form that most sharply highlights the role of the American state? This is not just something happening “there”—everything we receive “here” might also be fragments of edited, concealed, and erased information.
In the 1980s, Solmaz left her hometown in Iran with her parents who came to the U.S. to study. Standing on the outside, not overly concerned with individual differences, Solmaz focuses on cultural universals and the possibilities of collective dialogue. In 2014, she returned to Iran for the fourth time and said: “There was nothing that felt ‘mine.’ The language that held together what I thought this loss was fell apart.” Disintegration did not stop her from pursuing lost feelings and lost worlds. In the "Personal Effects" series, she attempts to reconstruct what she has never seen—through photos, letters, family memories, and news clippings:
it was his bare toes
that made me cry
because I realized then he had toes
and because dusted in the white
desert sand they looked
like a corpse's toes
while his hands worked off a peel
inches above the earth
In a loss that cannot be traced, what Solmaz restores is not some hidden truth, but traces of a life that once existed. She says: “The lives of others are not intellectual curiosities or conceptual playthings—they are lives and if I'm not loving them, then I shouldn't write them.” She describes her uncle in the photo, standing on the vast earth, unable to leave the tiny piece of land dictated by war. His toes are covered in dust; alive, yet corpse-like. Acting without will to live, movement without vitality.
In the "Personal Effects" series about her uncle, U.S. military jargon from the Department of Defense still appears in capital letters throughout the lines. Although Solmaz cannot resist death and loss, she resists the language of war-makers. Through intimate human details, she shifts the focus and defends against the violent emptiness of political speech.
Solmaz’s second poetry collection Customs, published in 2022, refers both to border customs and to cultural customs. The procedures at “customs” reflect layers of surveillance and mistreatment; meanwhile, the customs we live by—surveillance, domination, violence—have also become habits. In her poem “Without Which,” she writes:
I have long not wanted much
touch to turn away from and sleep
a sleep to bring the spoon up
and slurp the soup I don’t notice gone.
Like that mostly, my life.
]]
No crueler word than return.
No greater lie.
The gates may open but to return.
More gates were built inside.
]]
Some days,
just to think
of washing some dishes─
mismatched and in a rust-stained sink─
touching things I have spent my whole life
]]
touching─
If not for the state of half-sleep, “I” cannot resist awakening and reality. I must remain drowsy in order to survive. What I try to avoid thinking of is return. Returning home requires passing not only physical gates but also invisible burdens of memory and emotion. For the displaced, even hearing the word “return” hurts. It’s not that they don’t want to go back, but that even if one gate opens, there are more gates behind it—endless limits and veils. “Return” becomes a lie. If one cannot return, one must not even touch the idea of returning. Not out of unwillingness, but because the weight of return is unbearable.
Exile is lived in the everyday, in a sleepy everyday—the mismatched dishes left in a rusted sink. The damaged place where I live out my broken days. I can’t wash the dishes, just as I can’t touch or cleanse my own existence. Any small daily gesture might suddenly bring me into contact with what I’ve tried to avoid. Washing dishes conjures my entire life. Even without knowing what memories it may bring, the act of touching has already begun—it breaks the paralysis of helplessness. This poem ends on a dash, extending into endless, ceaseless touching.
In the second session of the poetry and writing course I curated, “Voices Emerging from the Blank,” we discussed Solmaz’s poem “Without Which.” One participant said: “The recurring brackets in the poem feel like the shape of a gate, constantly blocking the speaker’s touch and recollection.” Indeed, the brackets between stanzas resemble two gates. If read vertically, they become a sequence of gates—repeated barriers between daily life and memory. Surviving means crossing boundaries. In the end, even “touching” is interrupted, signaling how difficult and distant that gesture is.
The form of the bracket profoundly echoes the poem’s theme: if not in the sleepy state of life, “I” cannot live. If I don’t truly awaken or return, I won’t know that behind the gate is another gate. I won’t know that return is a cruel lie. If I didn’t have those dishes, I wouldn’t be able to touch the life I haven’t touched in so long. War interrupted my life; I interrupted my daily life. But the exile I most wanted to escape never ended—it continues to touch me.
Solmaz says: “I think of poetry as diagnostic, rather than curative.” But the act of diagnosing and confronting reality is itself therapeutic. She searches for tenses for displacement, constructs nonlinear and chaotic narratives, and rebuilds the inner landscape of the exiled. She is masterful in employing a paradoxical narrative structure: writing the alienation and despair of “here, I, now” to reflect the omnipresence of American violence. The world “I” inherit is a permanent exile without home.
Solmaz is not interested in merely contemplating the world; she wants to change it. “If the point isn’t to end the evil, then she is not interested in imagining it.” In an interview with BOMB magazine, she said: “Marx has always been a huge influence on me: the point isn’t to think about the world, but to change it. As a writer, my addendum is that the point of literature isn’t to just understand the world, but to end it. That ending could come through a reminder of why, of what is possible and waiting for us on the other side…. My intention is always that ending, even when my pitch becomes a little more spiritual, lyrical, or interiorized.” She wants us to look at this life that protects and confines us—mercilessly—under a light that takes years to reach us.
My Wilderness Quest with Georgia O’Keeffe
To approach the wilderness of nature, and the wilderness at the limits of my own creativity, I went to Santa Fe, the capital of New Mexico, for a three-month residency in 2018. After wandering freely for a while, one day I stood before a painting at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and thought: Where is the place she painted? I was living on the same land she once painted—why not walk into her paintings?
Thus, O’Keeffe’s paintings became my guide in New Mexico. I tried to find every scene in O’Keeffe’s paintings, wandering while thinking: Why did she paint it this way? How did she respond to the strange formations on the earth’s surface? Where did she anchor her gaze? What lines and colors did she use to capture nature? What kind of “nature” was she reproducing?
The moment I entered Ghost Ranch, O’Keeffe’s first home in New Mexico, I immediately understood how realistic her style was—beneath the azure sky, crimson rock formations stood in endless succession across the ochre desert, forming a surging, undulating horizon. Pale yellow sagebrush and dark green cacti climbed over the crest and rushed toward her adobe house. The way she portrayed the contours of ridges, the surfaces cut by mountain faces, the folds of resilient textures, the recession of near and far objects, the contrasts of light and color—all revealed that what she was devoted to was not her own reinvention, but the magical reality of things themselves, untouched by the artist’s will.
If anything in her paintings seems surreal, it is because the norm of New Mexico is already surreal. Her continual pursuit of realism was, in fact, a focused simulation of nature.
O’Keeffe’s gaze could not turn away from the strangest formations on the land. When I walked into “The White Place,” I was amazed by how, among these complex and rugged stone towers, she centered her composition around a suspended absence. She could not help but be fascinated by how nature, in a moment of indifference, laid out such precise structures. It resembled that moment of clarity when our consciousness transitions from the unknown to the known—an inescapable clarity and conviction.
I also visited the “Black Place,” about 150 miles northwest of Ghost Ranch, known by the Navajo as the Bisti Badlands. A vast expanse of black-gray volcanic hills, wrinkled and rising one after another like a herd of crouching elephants. It was mysteriously untouched—an unnamed vitality and beauty of the wild. O’Keeffe often sketched, camped, and sheltered under her car here to avoid the sun.
O’Keeffe said that to find the feeling of infinity on the horizon, one must climb a mountain. Pedernal Mountain, she said, “It is my personal mountain—absolutely mine. One day, God told me that if I painted it over and over, He would give it to me.” In her early paintings of Pedernal, the mountain is supported by a long, steady, descending contour. The flat summit nears the top of the canvas, almost centered, its sides symmetrically lowered like arms embracing the grasses and sands below. At that time, what she cherished was not the accumulation or eruption of force, but the dissolution of force and a seamless unity.
In her later years, O’Keeffe’s depictions of Pedernal Mountain paid less attention to the textured fold lines. The mountain shifted from dynamic to static. Though it appeared casually sketched, the outlines still accurately captured the ridges and undulations of Pedernal. The use of flat monochrome and partial depiction turned the mountain into a pure symbol. The peak sank below the midline of the canvas, even resembling a gently floating horizon. O’Keeffe’s gaze had stopped focusing below the summit on the life struggling there, and turned upward—to the vast void beyond the peak, to the transition between earth and sky.
O’Keeffe bought her second New Mexico home in Abiquiú for one reason: a black door. She painted that black wooden door repeatedly, peeling away the house and courtyard until only the simple shape and color remained. “It is only through selection, elimination, and emphasis,” she said, “that we get at the real meaning of things.”
When I stood before O’Keeffe’s black door, I understood what she ultimately captured in her paintings: something as vast, hollow, untouchable as her bones and sky—beautiful but devoid of kindness, plunging us into dizzying mystery. I also understood why her home was so austere. Without that austerity, the whole world outside her window would not be able to fully draw her gaze inside. The bare walls, simple table and chairs, bed frame, sideboard—they became a gigantic frame that sturdily held the breathtaking world beyond.
O’Keeffe said that the moment she saw New Mexico, she knew she had to possess it. New Mexico is the wilderness of my longing, and O’Keeffe’s paintings became the wilderness I sought. To return, in 2022 I was admitted to the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Once again, I returned to Ghost Ranch and faced the vast desert that neither cares nor mourns, where every inch lives and dies without regard. I realized it belonged to me—it wanted me to live among landforms undisturbed by human will, to await the fading of each word I know, to welcome beauty, harmony, and terror as they come and go. Just like in the poem I wrote for O’Keeffe—
Those moments before she arrived
I had no idea tears would fall
It’s scarcity, she said
she believed in the great collapse
freeing up enough space
to accumulate time
Is it through circling?
my question to her
met without answer
in the three corners of the room
respective mirrors hung
she tells me you need to
go further
hide deeper
all the seams
have to cast shadows
After she leaves
the scent rose
space began to slowly cave
folding into a white rose
How I yearn to tell her
a vanishing point
being out of reach
becomes holy
Ugly Falling into Nothingness
Under the scorching sun we walked into Engakuji Temple in Kita-Kamakura, barefoot over the cemetery stones, and I sat within the shadows. I picked up the cotton, gently touching its fluffiness, watching the indentation slowly swell back to shape. I began to tear it. Each finger winding into the cotton, using all my strength to destroy the cotton—as its outward tension suddenly turned inward, violently compressing, catching the fierce force released by my hesitation, cowardice, and weakness. I could not tell if I was stretching the cotton open, or it stretching me apart. I collapsed into sobs at that sudden betrayal and redemption.
Is this what living is? Ozu. Pressed against the character “無” (“nothingness”) on the gravestone, I saw a deep space carved into nothingness. Does nothingness also have space? Ozu. I pressed so close that the smooth black gravestone reflected me and the emerald hills behind me. The slanting afternoon sun was reflected within its darkness. Yasujirō Ozu thus framed everything. The ugly is inside too. That is the betrayal of emotion—intimate belonging torn apart. Like the father in Late Spring seeking to remarry in relation to his daughter, or the mother in Late Autumn seeking to remarry in relation to her daughter—their remarriage seen as dirty, immoral, and unforgivable; crossing a sacred boundary, undermining a closed and stable social order. The sense of self built through “you” was loosened; the happiness built through “you” was shaken; the worldview built through “you” was denied. What is truly dirty, immoral, and unforgivable is not the family member’s remarriage, but my own falling away. I have been expelled from the household, abandoned before the future, my life frozen.
One so easily betrayed carries a destiny deemed dirty, immoral, unforgivable, roaring toward the void of promise—ugliness being the pure trust and surrender itself. Yet the swelling cotton filled the emptiness. Just like the night in Late Spring, when the daughter accuses her father of intending to remarry, but he has already fallen into deep sleep. A dark empty vase in the room; on the wall behind it, tree shadows sway.
The daughter, roiled and unsettled by the father's betrayal, her imaginations and fears swing wildly like the empty tree shadows; the father who lies to reassure her about remarriage stands, empty as the vase without a single flower, solid and still before the swirling tree shadows. Ugly falls into nothingness. It is ugly that it constructs fictitious shadows to bear the night. The illusion I believed cannot be shattered by reality. My falling away ultimately stemmed from my lack of faith in connection. I lacked the courage to build a relationship transcending the mundane.
Thus I lived in a posture of contradiction and guilt, like the widow in Tokyo Story who, after eight years of widowhood, confesses to her father-in-law: “No, I’m not as good as you say…Recently, I can’t remember him arriving anymore—perhaps I forget him more often. ” This is a struggle—a struggle toward the complexity and contradiction of life. Ozu said: “The earth is real; the lotus also exists within reality. Conversely, one could describe the lotus to highlight the earth and stems. Postwar society’s impurity, confusion, and filth disgust me, but that is reality. Simultaneously, humble, beautiful, clean life blooms—that is another reality. Without attention to both realities, one does not deserve to be called a creator.”
Ozu’s film A Hen in the Wind, which he considered a “failed work,” gazes at the lotus in the mud—at life’s fragility and tenacity. A poor widow waits for her husband’s return from war, scraping by with her young son. When the child falls ill and hospitalization looms, she agonizes over medical bills and the fear of burdening others. In desperation, she contemplates selling her body. In that moment she moves to a corner, lifts a curtain. A mirror is revealed. She lowers her head, avoiding her reflection, then slowly raises it and looks—increasingly gasping.
To face oneself with no cover and no escape is a storm that suffocates. Ultimately, she covers her face—an act of resolution, of survival that entails facing one’s own moral fracture. To gaze directly is so difficult. Even greater is the courage to betray one’s own sight, to act in that moment toward a new morality, carrying weighty guilt and goodness.
When the husband returns and cannot forgive her betrayal, he pushes her down the stairs. This dramatic “fall” closely mirrors the emotional rupture’s pain and subsequent intent to destroy and retaliate. Yet the raw portrayal of violence, though sensory and wrenching, repels the storm of fear, pity, and reflection it stirs. This is Ozu’s discipline: excessive indulgence dismisses emotional gravity. Subsequently, Ozu’s use of empty shots, distant framing, ellipitical cuts, betrayal-driven narrative, and revolving emotional focus—all compose a vessel to bear the self placed amid something greater than itself.
Empty cotton thus becomes the fullness of life’s weight. The ugly, the beautiful—Ozu confronts them and frames them for our sight: layered sliding doors, people behind them. The depth of their sigh is the depth of their understanding. Knowing the green and the pale, birth and death, are all part of the ordinary. That sigh is not a denial but acceptance—acceptance of upheaval, collapse, and the order that follows. In Tokyo Story, the young woman, outraged by her relatives’ indifference, exclaims: “Isn’t life too disappointing?” Her sister-in-law replies with an elegant smile: “Yes, life is disappointing.”
That slight smile gently and sweetly embraces sorrow and joy, with no innocence and no denial—no concern whether destiny forced her open or she forced open destiny. Disappointment isn’t the limit; the calm affirmation of life—saying “yes”—is the horizon of her existence. That resolve appears in Early Summer, when Harue, played by Setsuko Hara, chooses to marry a widower. When her parents and brother’s family sit around asking whether this impulsive decision is binding, she answers brightly and decisively, “No.” Her family bows their heads, falling silent beneath her steadfastness.
To calmly say yes or no, to affirm presence or absence, is a form of life-affirmation—it allows ugliness to fall into nothingness. Ozu said: “Through the lens I seek to restore humanity’s original abundance of love.” This love is like the father in Late Spring, answering why father and daughter can no longer live together: “You are about to begin a new life that doesn’t include me. This is an order of life and human history.” Love is respect—for the order of being born, unfolding, collapsing, dying. Ozu’s films reveal life’s posture as cotton: its softness is its toughness. It cannot stop flowing and changing; it will not shatter easily. Its movement and change are its integrity. Like the character “無” carved on Ozu’s tomb, each stroke is a profound and certain space. Ozu, using life’s impermanence, invites us to glimpse enduring kindness.
— From Longing for the Infinite, published by Zebra Crossing Press in 2021.
The Body Without End — An Interview with Italian Painter Lorenzo Mattotti
“Exploring… back then, we spent all our time exploring—with our eyes, our hands, our bodies, and our language. In a small room, time was long, nearly eternal, eternal.” Lorenzo repeated the word “eternal” twice, as if applying perfume to a memory of time gone by. Or perhaps, it was only at the age of seventy that Lorenzo came to realize how the undistracted love of youth could easily dissolve the cage of time and space.
Love has no end, and so the body has no end.
At the start of our meeting, I told Lorenzo that in 2004, after watching Eros, the triptych film directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, Wong Kar-wai, and Steven Soderbergh, I wrote an article—not to critique the film, but to closely examine three sets of transitional images and the main visual poster. That poster was created by Lorenzo himself—a man and a woman entwined in an embrace, floating in oceanic blue. The lines are soft and fluid, and the clustered strokes form a density that gives the flesh its substantial weight. True affinity is just like that—light yet solid and profound. So beautiful. Pure desire needs no background. Realistic desire is the kind that breaks free of the cage of time and space.
Lorenzo’s studio in Paris is steeped in the rich scent of paint. He speaks slowly, but each word carries a resonant clarity. At times, we would chat casually; at others, we’d fall into silent observation of the artworks, maintaining a rhythm of spontaneous conversation and attentive viewing.
Lorenzo has divided his studio into two spaces—one for splashing ink and oil paint across large canvases, the other for meticulous work that takes time. The desk is covered in hundreds of colored pencils, with a wall of books beside it, another filled with music CDs, and a cabinet full of sketchbooks. The eternal images of eroticism between men and women that he explores are scattered throughout these sketchbooks—some drawn in charcoal, others painted in acrylic.
Opening a watercolor sketchbook made of handmade Nepalese paper, every page features a man and a woman lying or entangled in a room. The straight lines within the compositions contrast their lazy, teasing bodies that flow freely, highlighting how physical exploration cannot be confined by tangible boundaries. At the same time, sharp lines and stark color contrasts pull the tension of their erotic connection taut—so taut that the drama seems not to lie outside their bodies but instead emerge from within, forming a magnetic field of mutual attraction.
He carefully lifts each sheet from between translucent interleaving tissue paper. The pastel and colored-pencil originals are those same erotic images I saw in Eros. What drew me most wasn’t the naked figures in water, but how their flesh tones echo the forms of the mountains, how their poses mirror the earth’s undulations. Examining the original, I noticed that what seemed a single watercolor wash actually blended multiple hues—simple harmony often concealing intricate layering. Each blue is distinct.
Curious, I asked what differs between intimacy in a private room and openness in water. “In a room,” he said, “the man and woman move like shadows, exploring an inward intimacy. In water, they are liberated, expressing a natural love, a universal love—the human becomes part of the natural.” These are two complementary states, thematic threads he continues to explore.
Born in 1954, Lorenzo studied architecture in Venice, learning about spatial embodiment. In 1984 his comic Fuego broke narrative conventions, experimenting with how color can be the body of emotion itself. His bold, compositionally rigorous, atmospheric works in experimental comics drew international attention. From 1993 he began illustrating provocative covers for The New Yorker.
He has also interpreted literary bodies—illustrating Carlo Collodi's The Adventures of Pinocchio, the Grimm Brothers' Hansel and Gretel, Edgar Allan Poe’s narrative poem “The Raven,” and Jonathan Swift’s satirical novel Gulliver’s Travels. In 2019 he wrote and animated his first feature, The Bears' Famous Invasion of Sicily, exploring modern fable. He has painted key visuals for the Venice Film Festival for consecutive years, and in 2024 was invited to create a dynamic exhibition, The Art of Running, for the Paris Olympics.
Exploration means an insatiable appetite for possibility.
Lorenzo moves freely between charcoal, pastel, ink, comics, illustration, graphic design, and animation. I told him, “You’ve been everywhere, yet the light, colors, and landscapes in your work feel so uniquely Italian.” He laughed: “Yes! Italy’s light is extraordinary—no other land has its yellows. My roots are there. I return to Tuscany every summer—I love that landscape!”
Opening Pinocchio, the Italian hills, houses, roads, trees, and clouds emerge under Lorenzo’s pen with a poised yet dynamic aesthetic: a curving foreground road stretches into fluffy cumulus clouds overhead, ocher roofs and elevated embankments softly echo, rhythmic lines and saturated colors dance, turning the horizon into a living, winding body.
Though set in a deserted landscape, narrative fierceness is already embedded visually.
I asked him, “When switching between media and projects, what challenges arise?” Lorenzo replied, “I love improvisation—full of raw energy! That's easy. But illustrating a book demands thorough design and drafting—reliant on reason and structure, not just free expression.”
So how did he respond to Pinocchio’s original narrative voice—the bold opening by Collodi?
“Once upon a time, there was a…”
“There was a king!” a young reader might quickly say.
No, child, not that. Once upon a time, there was a piece of wood.
Not a fancy piece of wood—just a plain, ordinary log, the kind one might toss into a stove in winter, or burn in a fireplace to warm a room.
I cannot say exactly how it happened, but one day, this piece of wood appeared in the shop of an old carpenter…
Lorenzo placed that chunk of wood prominently at the bottom foreground, gazing upward toward the carpenter amid the shop and slanted rooftops. Using linear perspective, the wood is larger than the woodworker, with beams cascading over it, elevating the wood’s presence. His detailing of grain and texture is precise—the rest of the scene simplified into abstract shapes, maintaining visual unity.
Just as the text shatters expectation from the start, Lorenzo’s visuals convey primal vibrancy. Three diagonal beams disrupt horizontal and vertical stability, creating visual dynamism and rhythm, leading the viewer’s gaze toward the modest piece of wood. The intersecting black beams across the wood and roof form an unstable harmony, layering the spatial depth. The striking contrast between the orange foreground and black background reorganizes visual weight and motion.
He said, “Illustrating needs logic and structure,” and that’s evident in his deliberate design of line, shape, and color interacting with the original story—lively and magical. Throughout the book he adds pastel details, neat monochrome sketches, and bold ink strokes, aligning stylistic variety with Pinocchio’s tumultuous growth.
Moreover, the original Pinocchio text is vivid: Geppetto’s nose “shone red like a ripe cherry”—“eyes bulging, mouth agape.” Meanwhile the fire-eater’s “beard hung to the ground so long he could trip on it… his mouth like a furnace, eyes like two red lanterns alight.” Lorenzo channels this energy, shaping characters whose forms and gestures dynamically reveal their temper and shadows.
I told him, “You draw shadows, but they are bodies of story. Within the shadows are flourishing details breeding new plot. Something must bloom out of that darkness—shadows also have life.” He replied quietly, “Yes, shadows invite imagination. I give readers space to explore.”
In his Hansel and Gretel, rough ink strokes render a forest twisting like a demonic body, with two fragile human figures dwarfed by that shadow—a literal and textual depiction. Dread becomes form, a unified vocabulary of style and content.
At the end of 2023, Hansel and Gretel was performed at the Opéra de Dijon, with musicians performing live while Lorenzo stood onstage improvising brushstrokes—one moment an abstract black spot became a trembling tree—projected on a giant screen. The audience’s collective imagination grew darker than the imagery itself—they wove their inner fireworks and monsters with Lorenzo.
Finally, I asked, “Do you draw every day?” He said, “I go to the studio daily—put on a CD, read a bit, think of some ideas—is entering creation—but not always drawing. Here, look at what I drew last week—no one’s seen it yet.”
He turned and brought a stack of “black paintings”: large sheets dominated by black. The darkness wasn’t flat—it was rendered line by line to depict overlapping, advancing, entwining waves. A small boat almost swallowed by the sea. Waves upon waves, black gripping deeper black. One wave crashes into the sky. The ink builds relief upon the paper, glinting.
Bring your eyes close, and you fall into the sea.
This black isn’t still—it’s vivid and forceful. Lorenzo’s strokes vibrate with energy; the waves rise like mountains, spiraling like black holes. He said: “No sketches! I intuitively paint from start to finish—pure improvisation!” I felt pulled into the gorge, sensing the raw elemental force he harnesses to capture the ocean’s wild spirit.
Without waves of such magnitude, one cannot create an ocean.
Clear as day: the paper may show lines, but what emerges is the ocean in motion. That is Lorenzo’s profound craft.
His sea can tenderly receive human desire and also violently stir the will. “To convey movement in a static image,” he says, “you must remove the superfluous—retain only the maximum tension of line, shape, color.” That juxtaposition of elegance and primal force, forged over a lifetime, gives form to a body without end. Sometimes eternity means leaping into the sea, slowing your heartbeat—slower—so you can hear the ocean’s pulse. From then on you carry two hearts—whether you’re fireworks or monsters doesn’t matter.
