Basquiat. Graphic biography

New York in the late 1970s-early 1980s is an explosive melting pot of creativity, rebellion, counterculture. The scenario is unique and unflinching: the “American graffiti,” post-punk music, the frenzy of the “Big Apple” night clubs. The contemporary art market is at its peak, surrounded by lives on the edge, drug use, passions and desire for redemption. Basquiat is inside it all: from graffiti on walls signed under the pseudonym “SAMO” (Same Old Shit), to painting on canvas as a form of social affirmation, through the fierce use of color and shapes. A graphic novel that unfolds on a twofold reading level. The first, narrative, related to Basquiat’s artistic rise (his loves with Alexis Adler, Suzanne Mallouk and Paige Powell, his hard drugs, his compulsive productivity, his life on the streets and in the big galleries, his voluntary exiles in Hawaii). The second, more visual, in which the plates become an explicit reference to the chromatic explosion of his painting, with violent, blinding colors, full of contrasts.