Somebody calls it “visual poetry”, others “graphic upcycling”.

 

I take the page of a book (any book), I choose one word, I frame it, and it becomes the title of the illustration, which will be colored by transparent colors in order to show the text behind. It is a new format that I created in 1998, and developed completely in NYC after 2000.

 

These are my “Bookpages”, a creative exercise of interaction between text, interpretation, and image. Bookpages can be the size of a real page, or much bigger like the pieces on canvas (1mt by 2mt) that I showed in galleries in several solo exhibitions.

 

This format attracts the curiosity of children, adults and old people, and can be made on any kind of text (literature, commercial, instructions etc).

 

I used to make Bookpages in public, as live painting shows, and I made some successful classes in primary and secondary schools in Berlin, in a Communication University in Swizerland, and in private workshops.

 

One day Elio Fiorucci, watching my collection with his impeccable smile, told me: “Michele, your Bookpages are the dynamic confirmation that useless books don’t exist.”