ARGH! / 2022
publication, 21×28,5cm, 76 pages, 4 Colors offset
edited by Frida Carazzato, Caterina Riva
texts by Allison Grimaldi Donahue, Frida Carazzato, Caterina Riva
photos by Louis De Belle
published by bruno, Venice
Argh! is an onomatopoeia which references a bodily expression, a state of mind described through a sound rather than words. It hints at fatigue, exhaustion but also a reaction and a release of the body towards a situation or an environment. Argh! introduces the recurring presence of the body in Davide Savorani’s series of private notebooks through drawings. They are an expressive necessity, but also an artistic tool of inquiry, a source of ideas, space for personal confessions and emotions.
This publication is an intense selection of drawings the artist made in the last 15 years. In doing this, we have paid attention to the crossing of visual scripts for performative actions, written materials describing personal occurrences or delving into theoretical obsessions. Rather than categorize or index the drawings, the graphic design as well as the text commissioned to and composed by Allison Grimaldi Donahue, embrace a lexicon of fragments, of chance overlapping and of close memories, triggered, yet not contained, by the drawings.
Frida Carazzato, Caterina Riva
buy it now: https://shop.b-r-u-n-o.it/collections/published-by-bruno/products/copia-del-argh-davide-savorani
6. A worm has been crawling in my belly as I recall you running to catch the ball and smacking straight into the lamppost. As your forehead began to bleed, I felt an overwhelming sense of relief and a rush of foreign eroticism. My love for you was completely textual. Put up in a hospital bed or plagued with amnesia the risk moved back into fantasy. Letters that could have been addressed to anyone, perhaps most appropriately to myself. Desires turn quickly at that age (at any age) and I went home to write about it, but I tore those pages out. The frog-shaped lock holding the sacred book together was too weak and the liability too great.
Allison Grimaldi Donahue / secret n.6
17. Writing is a gesture. And it has often happened on the skin. Human skin certainly, with tattoos, with notes to ourselves on our hands, with the answers to the test scribbled on our thighs. But animal skins as well. An ancient desire to cover every damn surface. In Pompeii, we ate giant balls of cheese and rocket salad while staring at a wall from 200 BC. On the wall, someone had drawn the stages of life and beside it, in Latin, was written, up yours. You laughed, smiled a toothy grin full of greens, took out your ballpoint pen, and scribbled an even more vulgar message across my forearm.
25. Paper that turns on you: haunts.
Allison Grimaldi Donahue, secrets n.17, n.25
