The artist

LUCA CONCA

 

A painter lives and works in Morbegno who draws a graphic novel with the strokes of the Bic pen (an illustrated story between journalism, fiction and comics) whose settings suggest usual places of passage for us Valtellinesi.

I meet Luca on a bright late winter day at his studio in Morbegno.

I've never dealt with pictorial art and in fact this interview was intended to appease my curiosity: I leafed through the comic "Urlo" and recognized places and settings!

Morbegno, the agricultural area at the foot of Talamona, the viaduct over the Tartano stream and a monster!

Luca welcomes me into the room where he works, I find him bent over the paper with a Bic pen in his hand drawing some plates of Urlo.

 

Enus:

“Good morning Luca, you are an artist from Valtellina, you live in Morbegno… introduce yourself to our readers”

Luca:

“I was born in 1974 in Gravedona but I am a Morbegnese! I grew up and attended compulsory school here in Morbegno... my friends and acquaintances are from Valtellina, my life is from Morbegnese".

 

Enus:

“Being a painter is your job and you live on it, I assume you have a long education behind you”

Luca:

“I went to art school and then I graduated from the Brera Academy in Milan in painting in 1998. A path common to many artists.

I arrived at painting passing through drawing and illustration, driven first of all by the desire to tell something using images."

 

Enus:

“And it is for this desire to tell that you have chosen to do this job, then?”.

Luca:

“Yes, certainly and I was also lucky enough to be supported by my family in many choices and in my educational path.”

​

Enus:

“What were the most important work experiences, the ones that put you to the test the most?”

Luca:

“The most important experience was, as regards painting, my personal Double Sguardo in 2007 at the Galleria del Credito Valtellinese in Palazzo Sertolia Sondrio, because the chosen theme (a pictorial exercise on the portrait of pairs of twins) it forced me to confront the great genre of painting that is the portrait, and a new way of thinking about my technical and imaginative ability.”

 

Enus:

“Can you tell us about this experience?”

Luca:

“The theme was duality in the sense of double portrait, double point of view and repetition of the same subject. The starting point was five portraits of twins, including the painter and his twin brother. The text in the catalog was written by Marco Vallora and Armando Massarenti.”

​

Enus:

“From painting to comics, how did this project come about? “

Luca:

“The idea of ​​Urlo stems from the desire to combine a free and authorial graphic style with a genre such as horror which contains many highly suggestive elements using comics as a medium.

Together with the screenwriter Gloria Ciapponi we imagined a rural and peasant environment which in Italy was not often chosen as a setting.

Gloria thought of an episode structure that played with the temporal planes and that fits at the end of each volume. Characters poised between an unpredictable and ruthless malice and a banality of evil.

 

Enus:

“How long have you been working on it? You talked about Volumes, is it therefore thought of as a series? Are there or will there be sequels?”

Luca:

“It is a project born in 2020 and which will continue in 2024. Two volumes of Urlo have already been released and in these months Gloria and I are writing the third part.”

 

Enus:

“That means the comic was successful”

Luca:

"Yes, it is indeed like this: the setting, the graphic design, the story are functional. We are moving in the territories of "primordial" horror, the absolute evil without logic that persecutes you without leaving you any escape or room for negotiation, and from which one can only try to defend oneself. But be careful, because within Scream there are two forms of evil, apparently the same yet very different from each other: the "natural" evil, which springs from a world in which only the rule of survival, victory of the strong over the weak, and which divides living beings into the only two possible categories of predator and prey, and an "unnatural" evil, the result of human violence and folly, of greed and ignorance, greed and the lack of any form of piety. An evil perhaps even worse, because it lacks any raison d'être other than a profound selfishness and contempt for human life."

 

Enus:

“The profession of painter, being an artist, how do you organize your working day?”

Luca:

“My typical day doesn't exist, but let's say that I generally work 2-3 hours in the morning, waking up around 7.30; then I start again around 3pm and work until 7pm. Then after dinner sometimes until midnight or later.”

 

Enus:

“What equipment, what chemicals, what materials do you normally use to work?”

Luca:

“For painting I use pre-prepared cotton or linen canvases and I paint mainly in oil but I have also done many things in acrylic. For the cartoon I use smooth Fabriano F4 paper and I use the Bic pen for the revision and the acrylic for the coloring.

 

Enus:

“What are your responsibilities who do you report to for the job?”

Luca:

“Responsibility as a painter is above all towards the genre I choose (portrait or landscape) and towards the contemporary world: that is to say I have to be a painter who thinks about traditional themes with a spirit and a cut that falls into the sensitivity of the time in which I live.

As a cartoonist it's a liability to the effectiveness of the story, essentially."

 

Enus:

“Your works, your work, who is it addressed to? Who is your audience?”

Luca:

“The public is the attentive and curious one who decides not to give up something to hang at home or to put in the library to look at and look at every day. The main sales channel is the art gallery.

At the opening I usually preside over the Vernissage which represents the moment of the inauguration of the exhibition. It is an important step during which I also have the opportunity to get in touch with the public, customers and people involved in the organization of the exhibition, invited authorities, etc.”

It also represents an important moment of real promotion of my work: the promotional activity is almost always carried out in concert with galleries and publishing houses. Social channels are also an important way to get to know my art.”

Luca chose the place to establish his studio because the large windows face west, towards the lake and part of the Lepontine Alps, the upper Lario.

 

Luca:

“I live alone in this studio house from which I can see all the places that are dear to me and that have shaped my imagination and my vocation.”

 

To learn more about Luca Conca's work, I suggest consulting the personal Instagram profile @lucaconca3 https://www.instagram.com/lucaconca3/

 

NOTE ON THE PHOTOGRAPHS

 

The black and white photographs were taken with the use of a MAMIYA C330 PROFESSIONAL F BLUE DOT twin-lens camera with interchangeable optics combined with the SEKOR 80 MM lens with maximum aperture at f/2.8. He uses medium format 120 film and in this series I mounted a BN ROLLEI ORTHO 25 film with an exposure index of 50 ISO and for some shots the ILFORD DELTA 400 used with an exposure index of 400 ISO.