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Images 003

Rule 6: DECOR
~ by Olimpia Zagnoli






Olimpia Zagnoli is a Milan-based illustrator working across editorial, fine art, advertising and fashion for clients ranging from The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Guggenheim, Prada, Hermes. Her style is bold and colorful, drawing on art history and pop culture.
Aristotle’s definition of decor was meant for the theater – it was set design, the look of the world that the play takes place in. I am also building environments for stories to take place in, except these stories usually play out on a page. What I try to achieve is a subtraction of all the elements of the text. There is so much information in the words, but they can also be physical. You can lead a reader into smells and colors and light. I don’t want to simply retell the story in my art, but to synthesize the impression I got from it.

I guess the world that I build for the story to live in is really just another way to look at that story. It's my way of telling my own story inside somebody else's.

My work looks very simple, you know? And everybody says, “less is more” which is obviously a great motto. But sometimes you see a lot of stuff that is not just simple, it’s just less. Like they took a shortcut. Good minimalism takes great effort. When you look at the graphic designers and illustrators from the 1950s or 60s, they were able to do something that looks so simple. But inside any of those projects, there's so much behind each one, so much work and so much research and so much thought.

So I get something to read – a text, or an article for example – that I’m going to illustrate. I go through it and then I try to think of what shape it could take, what is the visual suggestion that the text gives me, and how do I translate that into an image?

I always try to give my own honest vision. And sometimes it's also a language I’ve created, in my case mostly on computers, that's very bold and pop in terms of colors. I always try to stay very connected to my own research, my studies, and the feeling I get from the work I am building out this environment for.

And then there's the refining part of it, which I think is the most interesting in a sense because it's less technical and more about choices – in terms of shapes or colors for sure, but also in terms of what you want to represent into your work, what represents the story. It's a moment I care a lot about.

That's the moment where the responsibility of being a visual communicator comes in. And I don't mean it in a blunt, politically correct thing, but in terms of choices. For example, I'm a woman and for many years, if somebody said draw a doctor, I would draw a man. But I have a choice now, to see it differently and translate it differently. Now in my career, I have more chances to speak out and defend my choices.

Interview and edit by Erin Ruffin
Illustrations by Melissa Jarram