Inside the cities

Pierpaolo Rovero lives and works in Turin where he was born in 1974. He is a painter and cartoonist. We met him many years ago and since then he has collaborated on Nuovo Progetto with the Yonas and Senait strip. We asked him some questions about his artistic career and beyond.

What was your path?
Drawing is a passion and like all passions you cultivate them as a child. For example, the link between wanting to draw and then make a job of it was also born through Yonas and Senait, because they are two real people. They are two Eritreans, who arrived in Italy with their mother about thirty years ago, they were hosted in our house and became part of the family. When I was twenty, I decided to get to know the family of origin of these friends a little. Backpacking, I went to this Eritrean village and spent a month there, where I practically did not speak to anyone, the only language I had was that of drawing. There I developed the idea that drawing is not just a passion, but an important part that I wanted to cultivate. They now live in Germany, but of course we are still in contact. In the strip, I brought them back to the age I met them. Senait in real life is now a doctor and she too is tackling the problem of this emergency on the front line.

Where did you go to school?
I didn't go to art schools. After high school, I enrolled in Literature and Philosophy, but I already had the awareness that I wanted to be a draftsman. When I went to Eritrea I got the confirmation and then from there I tried to send my works. At the time there was the Disney Academy in Milan which trained the future Disney designers. One day I received a phone call that still excites me to remember her, because on the other side of the phone there was Giovan Battista Carpi, one of the greatest Disney designers, creator of Paperinik, who invited me to Milan. From there the experience I lived in Disney was born. I had never drawn Disney characters, only my characters. I entered a large classroom where Carpi was teaching. He asked a question about literature, culture was very important for him to be able to draw. Nobody knew how to answer. I was fresh out of maturity and raised my hand. Sometimes you need a little luck ...

Did he make you draw a picture?
The moment he made me do the drawing he understood that he had made a mistake in taking me. He asked me to draw a Donald Duck and I drew it very badly. He took it in front of me and tore it up without telling me anything. I felt my heart tearing, also because it seemed beautiful to me and then he told me to come back with another hundred Donald Duck. I went home and trained. I had an appointment for the following week. His challenge was to see if I resisted and if I had the will to continue. I realized then that in all things it is good to have the dream, it is good to have the desire, but in the end what matters is how much you are willing to sacrifice yourself, to commit yourself to obtain that result.

At some point you came back, you showed him the drawings and then?
I brought him the package, he looked at them all and when he got to the last he tells me: now I can start telling you what you did wrong and let's start making corrections. Practically everything I had thought upset me.

You spent a few years at Disney and then you went somewhere else...
Yes. It was a leap of faith because it seemed I could continue, I wanted to continue. On the one hand, it was a struggle for me. One looks at one's age and tells oneself that perhaps it is time to make choices or it becomes too late. The feeling I had was that of transforming myself into a comic book employee, that is to continue drawing the same thing over and over while the funniest thing about drawing is to wander, to change, to modify oneself, to also explore different paths. I left Disney, went to France and there I proposed myself as a designer without knowing what was going to happen. I worked for two French publishing houses and I had a whole path linked to that market there. It was also difficult because they asked me to completely change my style and way of drawing. In France, the idea that I was a Disney designer was not very well received because we know that the French have the idea of ​​not wanting to contaminate themselves too much with American aesthetics ...

How do you feed your creativity? Or what are the things that can kill her?
I believe that creativity feeds on life. It is always important to have direct contact with real life, at least for me this connection is fundamental. If there is no observation, if you close yourself thinking that ideas can arrive by isolating yourself, you probably risk it. Instead it is very important to live, look, observe what surrounds you, dialogue and grasp the signs that can come to you from a thousand roads. I believe that leaving the house and looking around is a great way to stimulate one's sensitivity.

How did the city paintings project come about?
The idea is to talk about the quarantine period imposed by Covid and describe a bit how the world experienced this confinement, also inspired by Imagine, the John Lennon song. Among other things, in the original video there is a very simple idea, John playing and Yoko opening the windows. The act of opening the windows seemed to me a brilliant, beautiful act, applied to that text there is perfect. So I thought: if they open the windows what are they looking at? I imagined they were looking at the whole world, the united world expressing itself at its best, and therefore a world of peace, where everyone loves. And then there will be cities where people paint, cities where people play, cities where people read… That is, all actions that truly qualify us as human beings but for the good, in the feeling that we have to rediscover ourselves as a system. We are a system and we must also rediscover these qualities that each of us can have. It is a bit of a way to highlight these aspects. With an eye to the news, for example, I am now working on Yemen. Seeing these illustrations of mine, a girl from Madrid contacted me and gave directions to put me in contact with a boy from Yemen who can give me information about that country. To describe Jerusalem, an Israeli friend gave me information about its buildings, the way people dress ... So in addition to imaginary elements, I try to be relevant to reality, even if maybe then I put the camel inside the house because he too is in quarantine… So far I have drawn about ten cities and I would like to do many!

pierpaolorovero.com
@pierpaolorovero

​NP june - july 2020