Luca Barcellona - Lost in Strokes

48 pages
Text(s) by Fabiola Naldi and Luca Barcellona
Book design by Bunker
28 x 21 cm
Language: Italian
Softcover
Publisher: Lazy Dog
2022

Luca Barcellona is an internationally known calligrapher, whom we are used to knowing for his immediate language, made of sinuous letters that bring calligraphic art into the contemporary world. Lost in Strokes is a publication about the artist’s current work, which, however, differs from the ‘Barcelona world’ we all know.

The book speaks an unprecedented language, on the borderline between asemic writing and painting, which photographs Barcelona’s expressive, stylistic and emotional evolution and his work of very recent times, demonstrating once again how for the author writing represents a dense, meditative, certainly artistic act. Letters for the first time are transformed into urban landscapes that create new pictorial alphabets, skylines start from types, are nourished by writing, but also take their distance from it to become something else, much more complex, as if to summarise the artist’s journey so far.

Certainly “using writing, making writing, and partly overcoming writing itself is an urgent issue in our contemporary times” (Fabiola Naldi), and once again Luca Barcellona positions himself as one of the most interesting artists on the international calligraphy scene, who indeed each time seems to push the boundary of the discipline a little further, trespassing, through an expressive metamorphosis, into contemporary art.