Giardino - Lot 175

Giardino VITTORIO GIARDINO JONAS FINK The Apprentice (T.2), Casterman 1997 Original illustration for an album cover project. Signed. India ink and white gouache on paper 29.5 × 46.5 cm (11.61 × 18.31 in.) The Jonas Fink series is not only Vittorio Giardino's masterpiece, it's a masterpiece in its own right. Born in Bologna in 1946, Giardino started out as an engineer before turning to comics at the age of 31. His work, as rigorously graphic as it is literary, explores the psychology and moral dilemmas of his characters with extreme perfectionism. Such is the case with Jonas Fink, which he began in 1993, a chronicle of a young Czechoslovak whose childhood is shattered by Soviet totalitarianism. In it, Giardino denounces the loss of freedom, the arbitrariness of power and resistance through culture. Although not himself Jewish, Vittorio Giardino's heroes are generally sons of Israel. Perhaps because he remembers that, during the Second World War, it was the Poles and the Hebrew brigades who first entered his native Bologna. Perhaps, too, because his wife and daughters are Jewish. His style, akin to ligne claire, combines precision and sensuality. Slow and meticulous, he asserts a moral and artistic demand: to make every gesture, every look, every word credible. Such is the case in this illustration, very close to the final cover of Volume 2, The Apprenticeship, where the city of Prague can be recognized in each of its cobblestones.