Geographical distance has no meaning in art. The West and the East, especially Japan, have always been linked by an invisible and sometimes inexplicable thread. For example, the boundaries between 'Japanese style painting' and 'Western style painting' have never been well defined as opposed to what one might think.

 

If already during the Edo period (1615-1868), some Japanese artists had experimented with a type of painting in some ways inspired by Western style and techniques, the term Japan (japonisme, japonaiserie) was called the influence that the Japanese art had had in the West, especially on nineteenth-century French artists.

 

'Meisaku', literally 'Masterpiece' and abbreviation of World Masterpiece Theater, is a project that was born in 1969 and which gives life to a series of souls, produced annually from 1975 to 1997. A real boom of productions in reality , which gave the name to a whole genre of animation that takes inspiration or even literally proposes again in the anime version, some famous Western novels.

 

Even today it is the word that generally defines the classics of Western literature transformed into Japanese animation series.

But the look of the Japanese manga and anime world, art and Western literature does not stop and in 2016 the project 'Eshi de Irodoru Sekai no Meiga' involves in a single publication 43 Japanese illustrators, who reinterpret some famous paintings, from Sandro Botticelli, Henri Rousseau, Edvard Munch or Vincent Van Gogh.

 

Roberto Funai has long been passionate about the Japanese themes and protagonists of anime and manga and possible contaminations with his own training and artistic path.

 

For the opening night a special event: Keto (Dodo Beat Music) vinyl dj-set. For info: robertofunai@hotmail.it. The exhibition will remain on display until May 4, 2018