“It’s made by LRNZ”!
We’ve been dying to scream these words ever since he answered our call.
And today we finally did it. Lorenzo LRNZ Ceccotti is the name of that concentrate of pure art who gave a new look to the Trieste Science+Fiction Festival.
We got to meet him last year, when he came here to present Monolith by Ivan Silvestrini, for which he created the car (and the visual concept of the whole movie). He’s also done all the drawing for the comic of the same name, not just a transposition but a whole simultaneous project.
Now, while working at the transposition into animated movie of his successful work, Golem, he gladly took time to creat URSUS2, which is already a big hit on the internet:
“In 2016 Monolith was already going around through festivals, way before its italian release date. About one year before, more or less. Among the festivals that bothered to have it in their programmes, there was the Trieste Science+Fiction Festival. Considering that the science fictional aspect in Monolith is subtle and completely instrumental, I didn’t really hope that someone would be interested about it, so it pleasantly surprised me. Moreover, it was my first time in Trieste and once I got to the location (a beautiful theatre, not that different from Blade Runner’s modern retrofit) I could enjoy the design and communication style of the festival: really minimalistic, very modern and absolutely effective. It was a work by Davide Toffolo, extremely simple and powerful as always, enhanced by the graphic design by Francesco Paolo Cappellotto, whom I had the chance and the pleasure to meet during the screening days.
Now Francesco asked me to try and say what I, as the official illustrator of the 2017 edition of the festival, think about science fiction. Since last year Toffolo went towards essentiality, I tried to step into the role of a tout court sci-fi artist, with a far-more-loaded-with-information formal structure. All this was aimed to fix an hallucination of the future on paper and screen.
I grew up with sci-fi illustrators, comic artists, illustrators and concept artists and their clairvoyance gift keeps on shocking me, also and especially when futures they foresaw didn’t come true at all, yet are still a look at an absolutely coherent real alternative potential, whether it is a desirable of fearsome one.
The future has always been someone’s dream of nightmare, this is why I like that an hallucination may be really close to reality so much: it makes the unaware and exciting transmission of fantasy into the real world much easier.
Odaiba Gundam, for example, is one of those borderline operations. Strolling around Trieste, I fell in love with the building sites at the harbour, in particular with one of them, which is just behind the festival’s location. Building sites in harbours always have these gigantic machines made for titanic works, but in Trieste, thanks to its wonderful seafront, which extends as far as the eye can see, and to the timeless beauty of its cranes, I couldn’t help but think about a building site of the near future. Maybe one day the “Ursus” crane, one of the most amazing objects made by the planet’s industry, will retire, and will be replaced by a new bastion of technology, another “mechanical good giant”. I wanted to enjoy a science fiction in which man, together with science, can turn fantasies into reality, and I tried to imagine the harbour of Trieste in the future: I drew a family from Trieste at the bottom, to the right, really small: they are Linda, Annalisa and Andrea Babich – they do exist, and I send an hello to them – a mum and a dad who took their little girl to see what imagination is capable of. Go Ursus!”
Lorenzo Ceccotti, also known by his pseudonym LRNZ, is an artist who lives and works in Rome. He works in various fields of visual art: graphic design, motion graphics, animation, illustration and sequential narrative. Founder of the SUPERAMICI collective and of the BRUTUS/CHIMP Co graphic studio, since 2006 he devoted himself to individual projects. He has also been teaching at the IED, at the Scuola Romana dei Fumetti and at the ISIA, still in Rome. Among his most important works, as far as drawing is concerned, there are the direction of the animation of the documentary The Dark Side Of The Sun, his first graphic novel Golem (which was published in three different countries), Astrogamma – recollection of a story written together with Alessandro Caroni, which was originally published in instalments on Hobby Comics, the SUPERAMICI most important magazine, and the illustrations and cover of La Strana Biblioteca (The Strange Library), a short story by Haruki Murakami, published by Einaudi. In addition to that, he is also the author of several covers and illustrations for magazines, novels and comics. He has recently completed the MONOLITH project, for Sergio Bonelli Editore, which includes a live action movie and two graphic novels, printed in colour and written by Roberto Recchioni and Mauro Uzzeo, and his own artbook Viewpoint, published by Magnetic Press/Lion Forge.
His official website is www.lrnz.it.
