AlbertineFrom A to Z, the Journey of Combining Opposites

Albertine Zullo combines in her name A and Z, a pair of opposite letters. This fusion of contrasts is programmatic for her life and work. Albertine is deeply rooted in Switzerland, more specifically in Geneva and its countryside, where she was born and still lives today with her partner in love and art, author Germano Zullo. After her studies at the École des arts décoratifs and the École supérieure d'art visuel of Geneva, she opened a screen-printing workshop and started to collaborate as an illustrator with various Swiss and French newspapers. From 1996 to 2014, she taught screen-printing and illustration at the Haute École d'art et de design of Geneva. In parallel, she pursued a very productive artistic career: drawings, screen prints, lithographic works, wood engravings, notebooks, and objects of different types (such as dresses). She has been exhibited in Switzerland and abroad: Paris, Bologna, Rome, Valencia, and Tokyo. Thus, staying in her native Swiss village, Albertine travels around the world, as her books do—produced in a countryside house, but travelling from one country to the other, accompanied by texts in different languages according to their various translations.

The journey is a very present theme in her production, too, again in an opposite perspective. On the one hand, she invites us on trips going so far as to another planet; on the other, she can play with total absence of travel, with many variations in-between. In the comic book Vacances sur Vénus (Holiday on Venus), a young man wants to go on holiday but takes the wrong way and makes a stop at Venus, where he meets a strange extraterrestrial girl. The anecdote ends up in a sort of distant love story. Albertine puts forward the difficulty of communication between the protagonists at the level of the images by presenting the young alien's words as pictograms. Furthermore, whereas she chooses cold and pale colors for the Earth (blue, yellow, and turquoise), the predominant colors of Venus are red, orange, and green. Colors are completely absent in A l'étranger (Abroad): Albertine depicts only in black and white a man's vain search for the foreign country where everything should be better. His journey concludes with the discovery that the foreign place he has been searching for may actually be his home. The choice of sober black and white images accentuates the poetic strength of the text. Furthermore, the predominance of white spaces gives the possibility of pauses in the textual and iconic rhythm, thus giving the opportunity to reflect on what one reads and sees. In Des mots pour la nuit (Words for the night), the journey takes place in the young protagonist's dream. Staying in his bed, he travels around the pages—starting in his room with his colorful toys, going through landscapes full of flowers and sheep, and meeting figures and characters which become more and more oneiric, with the colors getting darker, at the limit of the nightmare atmosphere which transforms itself in a sort of intergalactic journey. Yet the protagonist finds his way home to his bedroom. Whereas in this picturebook there is a certain tension between travelling and staying at the same place, in La Java Bleue (The Blue Java), we face a static, almost claustrophobic story; it is the portrayal of a family whose existence revolves around watching TV until the day the television implodes. Until then, the space represented by Albertine remains the same one: the living/dining room. Following the TV implosion, the family has to find new activities. Even if they do not go out, Albertine makes them move in space (to other rooms) and in time (with objects of their past: a dress, a radio set and many toys). While the father and the mother dance, the boy plays with his toys, spread all over the living room. Albertine transforms the closed space of the page in a typical scene of so-called "wimmelbook," a teeming picturebook showing in a panoramic view many small figures...