Poster Artist Created Comedy Fest Mascot
Fiorucci was a boulevardier, raconteur and a gregarious self-confessed hedonist who owned seven vintage cars as well as an outstanding collection of antique mechanical toys. The little green man that became the symbol of the comedy fest was, he said, autobiographical - a self-caricature that evolved over 40 years.
"There are two types of people in the world, people who are themselves, and people who go through life pretending they are somebody else," he once said, "They can never say I was never myself."
During his career, Fiorucci designed more than 300 art posters and turned out eight covers for Time magazine. His work is a combination of the bawdy and the beautiful, the comic and the sad. It is represented in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Poster Collection in Ottawa, the Toronto Metropolitan Library, and Montreal's Musée d'art contemporain.
Fiorucci was born in Zara, Yugoslavia, to Italian parents on Nov. 2, 1932, and grew up in Venice. He came to Canada when he was 19.
"I thought I was going to be a short-story writer," he once said. "But when I came to Montreal I couldn't speak English, I couldn't speak French, I couldn't rely on language so I used cartoons without words to express myself. It just happened. I started doodling, and I started doing posters. It was an accident."
His first poster was a handbill he designed in the spring of 1962 to advertise Norman Mailer's visit to Montreal. Then he did the poster for Claude Jutra's film, à tout prendre. He was hired by the fledgling Montreal World Film Festival as art director and in 1964 won first prize in the Czech International Poster contest for his stylized portrait of an Italian Carbonari. He also designed posters for L'Opéra de Montréal, the hot air balloon festival in St. Jean sur Richelieu, and a logo for the Le Chateau clothing store chain.
He often said he fulfilled his ambition to write short stories, but not as he had planned. "Posters are, after all, short novels of art."
Despite his international reputation, Fiorucci was not well known in English Canada. He is mentioned in the French Encyclopedia Universalis and Who's Who in Graphic Art, but not in the Canadian Encyclopedia.
"When I do a job in English, they are always worried I am going to slip some subversive, subliminal obscene thing into the design," he once told The Gazette. "The French don't care."
August 01, 2008
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