Youth. By Marco Mendes.
Hardcover, 17.7 x 23.7 cm. Ed. A Seita e Turbina. June 2022. P.V.P. 25
Since 2005 Marco Mendes has been creating works of comics, illustration, drawing, painting and other visual objects that have been aggregated in a kind of autobiographical continuous flow and that can be subsumed under the title of Diário Rasgado. This project has undergone mutations not only in terms of format and circulation, form and thematic contours, but also in terms of revealing intimacy, personal history, traumas, which, however personal they may be, will always be able to echo in a universal way. Youth is a small book with an oblong format, composed almost exclusively of oil paintings on canvas or other combinations of materials and surfaces, creating a rhythm of one image per page. Revisiting the author's adolescence, his departure from Figueira da Foz to study at the Soares dos Reis artistic high school, in Porto, goes through many episodes almost always of small learnings and first experiences. Also shown are courtships, night outs, alcohol excesses and other outings. And cutting through the colorful and varied narrative of teenage life, the red images of the mother's illness. The exact correspondence between the fabric of the graphic narrative and the empirical events of the author, real work reserved for a primary biographism of journalism, is of little importance here. It is interesting here to focus on the levels that the book crosses between apparent factual surfaces and episodic events and the dive into moments of greater observation, reflective pauses, doubts and hesitations in behaviors, and the mixtures that moods and feelings, there are more or less easy interpretive keys, they lead throughout the pages. It will be enough for the reader to ask the following questions: Who sees? Who shows? Who counts? And if there is, without a shadow of a doubt, a melancholic tone on the lion's part of the volume, a partner in the growing pains that are confessed, it will end in a summer jubilation, of solar love, promising, almost edemic. Young.
