"The Return of Heroes"

A title with a sure impact that refers to a double consideration regarding the art of the eclectic and innovative Easypop, in relation to the form and content that it introduces into its production. On the one hand, there is in fact the consideration that is given - if there was still any need - to those characters that are now part of the mass culture of our days, absolutely globalized and able to interpret passions and desires no less than virtues and vices of the entire society of which it is reflected: characters derived from a collective multi-media imagination that, for the writer as for many others, comes in broad terms but directly from their own childhood. On the other hand, the title refers to a well-defined semantic operation for which, to the subjects just described, Easypop assigns the task of interpreting great works of the past, famous for their nature and for their authors, be they mainstream or absolutely niche, with the aim of recovering for the contemporary the study and therefore the knowledge of a full art for which the concept of useful and aesthetically valid went hand in hand.

After these premises - and with the hope of not repeating these concepts along the way except in the desire to deepen them - we proceed.

There is in truth an intimate relationship between the sculptural, pictorial and graphic production of Easypop and our time: and this relationship is played out entirely on the respective influence that one has inevitably exerted on the other and which defines the subjective choice of the artist as the only possible one, in the light of his own life experience and as a direct consequence of the historical period that generated it.

In fact, ours is an era without recognizable gods or divinities. If they exist, they are sons and daughters of the fleeting and the ephemeral while they survive, like butterflies, just long enough for a brief yet intense season. In any case, the ideas of myth, hero and great deeds - as they have always been handed down to us by classical literature - occupy a special place in our daily lives, fascinating in any case for their narrative power which, like anything else, is often successful. The development in this sense of a character increasingly linked to entertainment is a clear example, so influential as to recompose around itself a pantheon of varied and eventual characters worthy of competing with the past - but without the need to feel it as the bearer of a particular message or absolute truths.

However engaging, capable of warming the spirits and of recording a continuous increase in its intellectual gradient, the very universe of media entertainment (comics and animation, cinema and small screen, video-game panorama and big name illustration) has thus been able to rise to the forefront of consensual hierarchies, defining a generalized and globalized ethic that, in fact, has wanted to replace that which mythology and epic convey: in these new gods, demigods and heroes - fruit of the imagination no less than the classic ones and, like them, a reflection of a human being grappling with his own needs and his own nature, torn between the right thing to do for himself and the right thing to do for others - contemporary society has therefore found in them not only passions and impulses, ambitions and desires, values ​​and feelings too weak to be in line with our dazzling routine but has even invested them with a real and physical importance, aimed at extreme identification, as a consequence of a gradual but ineluctable emotional apathy that we have tried to remedy.

Then there is a cultural connotation that cannot be avoided and that invades both the personal sphere of the artist and that of those who observe his production: the persistence of the media message of that mass culture that, right from the end of the Second World War, invades the entire world with alternating but decisive fortunes, then finding fertile ground in the consumer society (between the end of the sixties and for a good twenty years) and shaping the same society that had felt the need to create it. Considered as the true "golden age" of "diffusion", that global revolution that we so much flaunt today was all the more powerful at the time by virtue of the limited means of communication at its service: nevertheless, it has managed to brand more than one generation through absolutely iconic characters, stories, sagas, so innovative that, full of pathos and epic, they still thrive today.

So it is not only an anthropological consequence linked to the cyclical nature of man's "things" in response to an emotional lack that has already been recorded, but also a real cultural necessity that has violently recognized itself only through its own products.

Easypop therefore fits perfectly into this narrative context, having understood the dramatic power of characters in objects and their informative appeal; while, as is obvious, it could not help but indulge the metalanguage that belongs to them as a logical consequence of its time.

The emotional bond aroused by the use of recognized and recognizable subjects is very complex, empathetic and sympathetic depending on who is involved: it will therefore be nostalgic for those who will have participated "in first person" in the media advent of this new mythology, recovering from the mnemonic data their own and most sincere individual dignity; and it will be of a cognitive type for those who, also due to their age, will not have been part of those first ranks of users but, in any case, will once again be predisposed to be influenced by an attractive power that is today more evident and amplified than ever, a power that has found in technological progress a valid and consistent support for its imagination.

The operation that Easypop implements is even more complex and focuses on the recovery of these subjects particularly dear to mass culture by reconfiguring them within a sculptural and pictorial architecture that in turn takes its cue from the great history of art - "great" understood as "capable" - in the certainty that this operation brings with it a more complete direct knowledge of the past as a vehicle of ethical, moral, emotional, psychological (but also intellectual, conceptual and, last but not least, realisational) values ​​that are not always perceptible at first glance and of which art in general is a promoter.

The fundamental union between the various orders of reading is in fact generated by the particular narrative formula that Easypop is able to impose on its production: the author chooses to give his "extras" the honour and the burden of representing precisely this noble past through its re-interpretation. To the "theatrical" commitment to which its protagonists are called, they add, preserve or assign those individual qualities that their literary and narrative nature brings as a dowry, ensuring an increasingly profound characterization of the work and capable of shifting attention from the level of the observer (recognition, memory and/or discovery) to that of the theatrical character (canon) to that to which he is assigned in the new representation (history or mythology). This is why Prince Actarus (Duke Fleed) of the Goldrake saga (Goldorak for the French, to whom we owe the name by which we know him but Grendizer for those who gave birth to him) becomes the "Dying Gladiator" by Pierre Julien (1779), immortalized in marble in the instant following the mortal blow received in the chest; or the philanthropist and multi-billionaire Tony Stark/Ironman transforms into the "Dying Gaul", in his Roman copy of the Greek original by the sculptor Epigono. We could go on forever.

The winning element therefore is not only the game of recognizing the character as an actor or the "other" work represented but everything falls within the proposed transversal message, a message bordering on crossover apology that fuels the internal movement of the work, thus ensuring its close survival: after all, as mass culture teaches, it is only the measurement of the interest curve of a given product that ratifies its success or oblivion. And Easypop knows this well.

For the record, it must be noted that his is not the only artistic production that, in the contemporary panorama at least nationally, has attempted an operation of this kind: some of his famous colleagues - who for convenience we limit to the two most renowned in this sense together with our author, namely Fabrizio Spadini and Giuseppe Veneziano - use the idea of ​​historical-artistic homage through the same characters to recreate their single and individual vision of contemporary art. But although all three avoid, through this stratagem, the search for a banal, cheap marketing operation, for Spadini the grandeur of the original ideas that he reinterprets are worth the price of the ticket, so that these prove to be absolutely valid despite the change of interpreters; while for Veneziano it is instead the search for emotional shock according to dynamics that are now viscerally pop, now subtly performative that takes the lion's share.

For our Easypop, on the other hand, the intimate relationship in which he concludes his protagonists has value, now in the presence of a role that is not theirs: therefore, the will to burden his subjects with their weaknesses and virtues - entirely the fruit of fantasy in relation to a given and well-defined literary phenomenon - becomes fundamental, while, at the same time, they instead interpret a role that presupposes canons, movements and identities totally different from those dictated by their canon; and which are, for those who observe them, all the more real as they are a physical part of the story.

Here then the complexity of the character is enriched and, consequently, the adherence to the complexity of the human being overwhelmed by the vicissitudes of life becomes more evident and amplified, generating the phenomenon of emotional transference and emulation that has so much weight in our society.

Francesco Mutti