Fumetto - Internationales Comix-Festival Luzern | 28.03. - 05.04.2009
Luca Schenardi is one of the most talented, versatile, unique and self-willed drawers, illustrators and graphic artists of his generation. His illustrations do just that what illustrations should do (but rarely allow): They don't only illustrate they actually allow a look below the service of what is pictured - bringing Schenardis critical, dark and somewhat messed-up picture of the world into view.
He just can't, he once said in an interview recently with the Kinki magazine, to just take things easy. "I do believe that I carry more than an average amount of aggression within me. I even take the normal, everday things like politics or jobs very seriously. It seems as if other people around me can blend out these things, I personally can't."
Restlessness, a constant lack of satisfaction and anger are the driving forces for his work, work that is concerned with the present world of mass media, consumption and mechanization. It is also not a coincidence that the title of his first book was inspired by the name of a TV show: D.I.J.D.S.D. - DAS IST JA DAS SCHÖNE DARAN is a play on DSDS (Deutschland sucht den Superstar), a rather pathetic German casting show. In his pictures Schenardi dissects and unmasks the world around him in collages that are built on produced or freely edited photographs. The result is a curious insight into a normality that's filled with oddness, absurdness and grotesqueness.
Schenardi's attitue and visions may be resolutely modern but they have unmistakeable forerunners. The huge romance novelist and musician E.T.A. Hoffmann is one of Schenardi's main idols. Just like Hoffmann and other dark romantics from the early 19th century, in which their work is filled with ghosts and other strange visions that tear up reality and take over, Schenardi also leans towards an interesting marriage of romantic fantasies, sensual landscapes and a tough social critic.
FUMETTO, Internationales Comix-Festival Kuzern, 2009