Sex rock & optical illusions
Victor Moscoso
Fantagraphics
Hardcover: 144 pages
Language English
ISBN / Barcode: 9781560976578
Subject: Graphics Illustration
*Starred Review* The reason so many hippies burned out may not have been too many drugs but too many hours spent trying to read Victor Moscoso's posters for the first generation of psychedelic rock concerts in 1960s San Francisco. This oversize gallery of posters, splash pages for Zap Comix and Moscoso's own one-shot comic books, a few of the artist's comics "stories," and sketches acknowledges in its first sentence what those fry-brain longhairs should have understood before it was too late: "Moscoso's posters are as illegible now as they were in 1967." Illegible then, illegible now, illegible forever. But mind-blowing as only a thoroughly trained (Cooper Union, Yale) artist could make them. Flouting conventional color complementation, Moscoso juxtaposed electrically bright, pure colors to produce illusory vibratory effects. Married to swirling letter shapes and imagery borrowed from nineteenth-century experimental photography and cinematography, his color storms became the standard for all other psychedelic art. It helped that he was an ace draftsman, especially when he switched from posters to comics, but his extremely plastic visual imagination was and is his biggest asset. Few other artists of any period have produced work of similar formal fascination: Escher, Monet, and some upon whose masterpieces Moscoso plays variations--Krazy Kat creator George Herriman, Klimt, Piero della Francesca. Which doesn't automatically make his stuff great art. But oh man, like, wow. Ray Olson
STATO: In Commercio
€ 46.50
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