The Masone Labyrinth is ready to welcome, for the autumn season, a new major exhibition dedicated to the writer Orhan Pamuk (Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006) and his unprecedented graphic production.

For more than ten years Pamuk has been writing and drawing notebooks daily, 12 of which will be exhibited and commented on in a scenic itinerary through the exhibition rooms at the end of the Labyrinth gallery, where Franco Maria Ricci's art collection is also on display.

It will be a real and spectacular exhibition at the same time , since the notebooks, in addition to being present in the exhibition, will be told by the author himself in an unpublished documentary-interview, and explored in depth thanks to projections that will immerse visitors in the world of the artist-writer Orhan Pamuk.

The first of his illustrations date back to 2009; the latest ones are from this year, because his graphic production continues uninterrupted every day. The pages of the notebooks are small masterpieces in which visual poetry, dreamlike atmospheres and travel notes "filtered" from his inner world alternate. His need to write and draw together, which often crowds the same (limited) space of an empty page, is the premise of his instinctive artistic practice, in which literature, thought and drawing complement each other. They are graphic expressions of contemplation.

Orhan Pamuk's knowledge of the drawing technique is profound, just as his reasoning about the artists of the past, which he knows well, is profound. Many times as a writer he reiterated his appreciation for artists such as Anselm Kiefer, Raymond Pettibon, Cy Twombly, to whom as a designer he showed his debt. In all these cases the gesture and often the word become fundamental elements of the composition, even in the depiction of a landscape or an environment. Cascades of words, compositions of waves, colors, sounds, lines and dots, letters...

Until today these colourful, often dreamlike images have remained unknown even to the most attentive admirers of the Turkish writer. Pamuk's notoriety as a writer, in fact, prevails over his pictorial talent (a private possession that risked remaining destined for friends and family). But drawing, graphic art, even for a busy literature professor and prolific writer, becomes the necessary means to express concepts that cannot be said or supported with words alone.