“Cinema should make you forget you are sitting in a theater.”
ROMAN POLANSKI
It is summer, late summer to be exact. Days are not as long anymore, but they are still quite hot. Nights are pleasantly refreshing and one feels the natural urge not to go back home, to stay outside as long as possible. After all, autumn is just around the corner.
The way out is the open-air cinema, an amazing “invention” that makes summer nights unforgettable. Squares, small towns, and beaches become the “theater” Polanski talks about. And parks as well, parks should not be forgotten. Like the one in which Concorto takes place every year. It is almost redeeming to repeat, every year, the ritual of arriving just before the screening to fully enjoy the moment when lights go out and silence falls. Not complete silence though, as the park hums with nocturnal creatures and is not far from the railway. Sometimes it takes a while, sometimes it happens straight away to be swept up in the dimension proper to the cinema, the one that makes one forget everything, along with the awareness of being in a wonderful setting, watched over by monumental trees and lighted by the glimpse of the moon.
Fabio Consoli’s 2023 poster features it all: Concorto’s wooden projection booth, popcorns (no popcorns – no true cinema), dim lighting, and the totem-like donkey. And the feeling of having spent years, and not just an evening, in the park.
In the author’s own words:
I depicted the feeling that one sometimes gets when captured by a film, that absence of “gravity” and time. In those moments when only the story on the screen exists, when everything else floats around the screen, out of focus and still.
Fabio Consoli:
After studying at the University of the Arts in London and at the School of Arts in New York, he decided to live in Acitrezza, Sicily.
His studio is an old camper van with which he roams here and there in nature and on which he works for his clients, who come from all over the world.
Among them: National Geographic, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, Boston Globe, Pentagram, Red Valentino, Apple Japan, American Airlines, New Jersey Monthly, Seiko Watches, Men’s Health, Feltrinelli.
Recently one of his pieces of work was selected by the Society of Illustration and was exhibited at the Museum of Illustration in New York.
