The Crackle of the Frost
With his strong coloration and curvy figuration, Mattotti can galvanize less-than-extraordinary scripts. Rather than revealing their weaknesses, he enriched Jerry Kramsky’s 1920s-set adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (2003) and Claudio Piersanti’s Stigmata (2011) more than any other artist, perhaps, could have. He works his magic again on fiction writer turned psychotherapist Zentner’s text, the case history of a psychological breakdown. When Alice tells him she wants to have a baby with him, Samuel starts hearing “the noise”—which Mattotti, without cue from Zentner, strikingly depicts as manta ray–like birds—and drives her away. A year passes; she sends a note; he leaves to find her. Injured in bizarre circumstances en route and vastly delayed by recuperation, he finally proceeds to find Alice. The denouement of his story is relatively gentle and very humane. The legend-like tales Samuel tells amid his travails provide Oriental fodder for Mattotti’s imagination, but, visually alluding to Cezanne, Chagall, Munch, Picasso, Botero, and others, the artist already dazzles us by employing so much modern Western art to make Samuel’s story come alive. --Ray Olson