COVERART, designed by Mauro Pispoli for Taplab wall covering. The image that becomes imagination. The imagination conjures up shared and inclusive worlds. Music as a preferred vehicle to universalize the imagination. There is an anomalous picture that has made the "pandemic" transmission of the musical imagination possible: it is the cover of the vinyl single at 45 rpm, the album at 33 rpm and the 12-inch mix for Technics 1200 console. Small works of square dimensions that gave free rein to graphic designers, artists and illustrators with the sound vein in their harmonious looks. In a present that is liquid and algorithmic, the covers are the last solid bastion of a music that is now dissolving between the cloud and streaming. Today, vintage covers but also new vinyl covers in limited edition, intended for the silent market of stubborn fetishists, are necessary bridges to connect the liquid future to the preservation of the best of a solid past. Mauro Pispoli comes from that wide-ranging context, from a multiple that today, with the distance of time, we consider properly and with the necessary iconographic importance. Rock and Pop are the central sounds that make up the covers with the greatest impact in the record market. Pispoli started with soloists and bands that were destined to become legendary. Their original covers were a starting point, a visual protein with which the author was assembling his figurative DNA, connecting the ideal cover to a malleable and dynamic form of the work. The first step was to fit into the setting of social experience, scaling the images to the size of the spaces concerned. No longer only small formats but prints adapted to the size of the environment, capturing the immersive quality of places, becoming pictorial and sensory wallpaper. The urban culture of creative billboards, the theme of the poster customized to the present, the antagonistic approach of the now digital fanzines come into play; different phases that mix with the initial matrix of the domestic format, that source code from which Pispoli elaborates his own interpretation on walls of variable format. The wall thus transforms from a passive design to a vibrating surface, similar to the electrical skin of a monitor. A small-format work adapts to the liquid processes of today's images, becoming mimetic and mutant. The appearance of the wallpaper confirms the dynamic process of a digital age. Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to the COVER AGE... Gianluca Marziani
