The New Yorker
September 29, 2003
Ele D'Artagnan
If Marc Chagall had made Tantric drawings, they might have resembled the jewel-toned fantasies of this self-taught Italian artist, who died in 197, at the age of seventy-six. The artist, a sometime actor favored by Fellini, shared his director's libidinous sense of the absurd. Villages float above copulating couples, and birds perch near phalluses the size of temples; in the best pieces every spare inch of surface is covered like a crazy quilt. Depsite their whimsy, the drawings have a lavish grandiosity, as if D'Artagnan (who took his nom d'art after playing a role in "The Three Musketeers") were painting murals on ceilings rather than sketching on the backs of envelopes.