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HERE BE DRAGONS

Di Rosa as Marius? not the Roman general born into an equestrian caste, but Pagnol's Marius, for whom maritime adventures did not end with crossing the port in Marseille, the one for whom sailing beyond the seas made his head swim, and who wiped his glasses behind the bar while endlessly listeneing to the Siren's songs? To be born and bred in a port, to have as a father an Italian docker, and a Spanish mother, watching ships flying myriad foreign flags, meeting on the streets sailors from all over the world, the world on one's doorsteps, could this lead one to travel the world? In any event, such an upbringing cannot help but provoke ideas in an inquisitive mind, even if officially Di Rosa, born in Sète, was not a sailer boy but a painter. A maritime painter? neither, look at those pictures, the sea is so to speak non-existent. No sea, but its fantastical creatures, three-headed monsters, open-mouthed chimera, one-eyed giants, and biological UFOs, like the ones cartographers in olden times enjoyed drawing on the white planispheres, at the extreme edges of the known world, showing that the imaginary, like nature, abhors a vaccum. And so the adventure begins while bending over an unfolded piece of paper. The white of the sea, like the painting's frame, is first of all an empty box, which needs to be filled to brim over. This explain why, earlier on, Di Rosa pretended to make paintings rather than comic strips. Life is before you, at twenty years old, a huge book of marvels to colour in, box after box. One can imagine his life unfolding like the embroidered fresco of the Bayeux tapistry. When he was twenty, on board his magazine Bato, created alongside Robert Combas, another lad from Sète, Hervé the Conqueror really felt that he was setting off on fabulous adventures… Jean Rouaud 2000 (translation Ann Cremin)

www.dirosa.org