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The Italian illustrator Lorenzo Petrantoni melds punk and Victorian styles to create detailed illustrative collages that serve as compelling commentaries on the current state of world affairs.
Timestory is the first comprehensive collection of Petratoni’s striking illustration for publications such as Newsweek, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, La Repubblica, and Libération, as well as brands including Coca Cola, Urban Outfitters, Nespresso, Burton, Swatch, Bosch, and many more. This work is supplemented by installation views of key international exhibits and select personal projects. Petrantoni's work has also been featured in other Gestalten publications including Visual Storytelling, A Map of the World, Cutting Edges, and Illusive 3.
Petrantoni composes his charmingly anachronistic, yet eminently contemporary collages by hand with dizzying accuracy. Each text and image component used in his precise handcraft calls to mind Victorian clip art, historical encyclopedias, long-forgotten copper engravings, and newspaper clippings. But when they are combined and viewed as a whole, each collage becomes a topical, thematically dense illustration. Upon taking a closer look, Petrantoni's pleasingly subversive way of melding visual and thematic scraps into his own unique images and patterns is reminiscent of Terry Gilliam's animations for Monty Python.
Consisting of small elements, yet making a big impact, Petrantoni's unique illustrative collages truly stand out amid the general monotony of advertising graphics and magazine design–and tell the Timestory of his work.
Lorenzo Petrantoni was born in Genoa, Italy in 1970. He studied graphic design in Milan and later worked as an art director at the French office of Young & Rubicam. Having returned to Italy, Petrantoni now pursues his passion for the printing of the past as a graphic designer and artist. He spends much of his time leafing through old encyclopedias and reference books in order to find text and images to incorporate into his work.
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