Is there an Avant-garde in comics? Can we talk about "comic poetry"? This is what a 27 year old comic strip author has been asking himself. Can an intellectual comic bring on interest? Are we falling into something vulgar? He'd answer himself maintaining his doubts and good intentions.Canicola? Avant-garde? What does Avant-garde exactly mean? A daring program against tradition and common taste? An aesthetic elitist circle of friends? Detachment? Is it acting like assholes? This does not seem of particular importance.Does an intellectual comic exist? What does "comic poetry" exactly mean? Is it a question of harmony? Of Rhythm? Lets take a look inside and examine the drawings before the comics. Poetry and drawing have the same stream of energy, the same desire. Poetry and drawing share fury and control. Then come the images, made of figures, lines and words. Back to comics in a certain way. Drawing removes from reality it's foreign characteristic, it opposes the sign of subjectivity. How beautiful. Drawing builds itself on a person's stroke. Often, a touch of black pastel as with Davide Catania. Other times pure black-lead as with Setola. Drawing can be built on lines, a "movement of dots" just as Amanda Vähämäki does.Then again "blur", maybe hidden away as Andrea Bruno tends to do; elegance and repetition in Nanni; necessity and torment in Tota; spontaneity and stammering in Monti. Drawing is always simply a different gesture, an extension of our hand and before that of our wrist, our arm, our glance and at the end as the voice for Carmelo Bene, it's an extension of our body. Broth of nothing has a syncopated rhythm, Bruno stirs up fog, small openings in his stories, shows us war, while Nanni suspends time, shoots fresh air and frees the field. Monti scratches with fragments of rough life. Like a rattlesnake he wants us to watch our backs, while Tota simply goes back to an initial feeling. Setola, awake by miracle, does not get sunburned thanks to his beach-umbrella. Shaking off the sand just in time he keeps us suspended in Fata Morgana; Vähämäki, in mourning, slowly goes by the tavern's door, looks for white spaces, goes on the verge. Careful though, Catania shows us with his strokes that music can shake. I wonder. Avant-garde? Better to think of it as the Italian motorcycling of Comics. Rhythm...

edo chieregato