edited by Maurizio Buttazzo and Malì Erotico
“Antonio Carmelo Erotico? Who, the one who takes photos with a hoe?” Guido Piacentini asked a friend one day. Antonio Carmelo Erotico is the photographer for *Frigidaire*, the Italian cultural magazine featuring comics, features, journalistic investigations, music and more, published from 1980 to 2008 with extremely innovative content by Italian and foreign authors, including Andrea Pazienza, and in which famous comic strip characters such as Zanardi and Ranxerox made their debut, turning it into a cult phenomenon. ‘Visioni del Sud’ aims to explore Antonio Carmelo Erotico’s artistic journey and, in particular, his work centred on nudes and eroticism – images that went on to become the iconic covers of ‘Frigidaire’ – in order to create an exhibition project capable of reinterpreting his artistic exploration with the benefit of hindsight. In *Erotico Erotico*, the exhibition curated by his daughter Malì Erotico and his friend and photographer Maurizio Buttazzo, the images serve as a valuable testament to the trends and underground culture that swept through Italy at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s. A portrait of a generation, captured by an irreverent and provocative artist.
Antonio Carmelo Erotico
Born on 21 January 1954 in Galatina, where he spent his childhood and adolescence feeling like a fish out of water. In 1972, he moved to Bologna, where he began and resumed his studies several times, eventually failing to complete his degree at D.A.M.S. *Make Up* was his first photographic project, exhibited by the Duemila gallery and subsequently featured at Arte Fiera. For fifteen years, he produced portraits devoid of psychological depth – portraits of real people whom he transformed, sometimes quite drastically, into characters from his own imaginary Panini album. In 1991, he published a book of architectural photographs documenting the church of S. Giovanni in Monte prior to its restoration. Since recovering from Hodgkin’s lymphoma, he has been a househusband.
