O LIVRO ENQUANTO OBJETO NA LITERATURA INFANTIL: UM PANORAMA CRÍTICO

Resumo

O presente escrito visa apresentar um breve panorama crítico sobre a presença de book artists, brasileiros e estrangeiros, na produção literária destinada a crianças entre os séculos XX e XXI. Essa presença é marcante por produzir um deslocamento no olhar perceptivo de artistas, críticos e leitores para o objeto livro – até então, compreendido apenas como mero receptáculo para textos verbal e visual – na área da Literatura Infantil. Nossa hipótese dá ênfase ao trabalho diferencial que esses artífices realizaram com as margens do códex (a dobra central e as viradas de página laterais), dialogando com reflexões que re-pensam o livro como forma e conteúdo de uma mensagem artística. Para executarmos nossa formulação interartes, buscamos referências nos campos da Literatura (Nelly Novaes Coelho, Sarah Dowhower, Maria Nikolajeva) e das Artes Visuais (Julio Plaza, Johanna Drucker, Maria do Carmo de Freitas Veneroso), em seu borrar de fronteiras, para re-pensar as relações entre palavra, imagem e materialidade.

ABSTRACT

Butcher Billy is a graphic designer from Curitiba, Brazil, who recently became well-known for creating illustrations that relate to pop culture in general, especially to comics, music, games, TV series and cinema, but also to politics, religion and arts in general. Among the illustrations in his portfolio are the series “Stephen King’s Stranger Love Songs”, “Dark Tales from the Black Mirror” and “Stranger Tales”. The first one, for instance, is a series of illustrations that reproduce the aesthetics of Stephen King’s book covers produced in the 1970s and 1980s. From the perspective of intermediality, some aspects that can be investigated are the approximation between Butcher Billy’s illustrations and the texts that have inspired them, the processes that involve the crossing of borders between several media, and the medial references created in the illustrations. Another aspect to be discussed relates to the reasons and impacts of the recent nostalgic wave in contemporary cultural products, especially in TV series, cinema and literature, a movement that also reaches Butcher Billy’s productions. More than an allusion to or a revival of works of the past, the illustrations aim to preserve an essence of a time by means of the recreation of a specific aesthetics.

Keywords: Nostalgia. Illustration. Intermeditality. Intermedial references. Stephen King.