If Peter Blake can illustrate Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice through the Looking Glass’, then fellow veteran Pop artist Jim Dine can assay this classic Italian fairytale. Brutally, as it turns out.
While the original text is cleanly presented, his lithograph illustrations are chaotic, gnarly and violently drawn (the originals will be shown at Alan Cristea Gallery from March 21). Dine turns Pinocchio’s nose into intestinal coils, dissolves him in muddy smears of paint and dangles him from a rope, tongue lolling, in front of a pair of Goyaesque ghouls. (And then there’s the ‘terrible dogfish’; say no more.)
In a brief postscript, Dine praises the character’s ‘ability to hold the metaphor in limitless ways’, and despite the avowal that he admires ‘his great heart’, it’s hard not to wonder if a context of deceit, puppetry and potential comeuppance within American politics has influenced the bleak shape of his imagery. Visceral scenes flare in the schizophrenic mix, but your five-year-old may wish to stick with Disney’s version.
