Conception and collapse of the image of the father in the book ‘When my father met the ET it was a hot day’, by Lourenço Mutarelli

Abstract

The production of Lourenço Mutarelli is plural, which goes far beyond what configures the language of comics. It is possible to verify the paternal figure as very significant in his work, especially in one of his more recent works, the book When my father met the ET it was a hot day (2011). Among the configurations proposed in his work, we find the paternal figure intertwined with the words and, especially, with the images of the book. In the illustrations, an “imperfect” repetition of the paternal figure proclaims a desire for remembrance and fixation of its materiality, that is, the artist seeks to preserve and isolate this image from the place and from the time of its “real” apparition (BERGER, 1982). In this procedure, Mutarelli’s work dialogues with the specificity of the image as memory and receptacle of the longing for permanence and denial of death. Based on these assumptions, we intend to verify how the construction of this character takes place in the development of the work and as it evokes the essential process of temporality of the image, which only has reality insofar as it refers to knowledge and values previously acquired, that is, recalled (FRANCASTEL, 1998).