With this new show Wall Of Sound Gallery shifts its attention from photography to illustration, confirming a project that encompasses every aspect, technique and language of music’s visual imagery. The choice of exhibiting the works of American artist Stephen Alcorn is not casual at all. Stephen has been a very good friends of ours for over ten years as well as a dear friend of Fondazione Fabrizio De André. Stephen, besides being a highly sophisticated visual artist and also a skilled musician, is a longtime fan of Fabrizio De André to whom he dedicated a cycle of 10 images. Some of them were featured in the books I curated on the celebrated singer-songwriter from Genoa – E poi, il futuro (Mondadori 2001) and Una goccia di splendore (Rizzoli 2007) – and were also included in the big multimedia exhibition at Palazzo Ducale, in Genoa.

The conjunction of a tenure by Stephen at Università degli Studi in Milan made it possible at last to fulfil our old dream of bringing to Italy “Modern Music Masters”, a beautiful series of relief-block prints that also feature the precious images of De André. “My images of Fabrizio”, Alcorn says. “belong to a series of portraits that I began two years ago or so on contemporary musicians. After having created portraits of the great music greats for years, I felt the need to portray artists that did contribute to the cultural upbringing of myself and my generation. My wife Sabina and I always felt lucky we were born and raised under the auspicious wings of Bob Dylan and Fabrizio on one hand, and of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones on the other. Thus mixing memories and imagination, I gave life to a series of true music icons. My ‘Modern Music Masters’ are constantly evolving, thanks also to my experiments on the technique itself. It seems particularly appropriate to me that the infinite variety of modern music gets validated by an endless experimentation in my way of representing the artists through this or that technique”.

Alcorn’s signature style can be volatile and expressionist-like, a kind of new and ironically psychedelic Brucke (the portraits of Kurt Cobain, Ray Charles, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Elvis Presley, Miles Davis) or romantically and almost redundantly symbolist (The Crowning of Bob Dylan, the De André cycle). An infinite passion for all kinds of music inspires Alcorn to democratically mix the transfigured faces of the greatest music legends with often ill-fated cult heroes or old blues and jazz masters, in an often surprising kaleidoscope of shapes and colours: besides the artists named above, Joan Baez, Bjork, David Bowie, James Brown, Jeff Buckley, Johnny Cash, Eric Clapton, Ani Di Franco, Nick Drake, Woody Guthrie, George Harrison, Jimi Hendrix, Billie Holiday, Mick Jagger, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Brian Jones, Lennon & Mc-Cartney, Madonna, Bob Marley, Nina Simone, Patti Smith, Bruce Springsteen, Pete Townshend, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Muddy Waters and Frank Zappa. An actual pantheon of popular music. Alcorn’s art transcends limitations of space and time, avoiding photography’s pretentious realism in order to free the imagination with a fantastic exploration of the greatest music of the last 70 years.

Guido Harari, Wall Of Sound Gallery