Lo stile imposto dal racconto. Note sulla ricerca permanente di Shaun Tan

The Australian artist Shaun Tan embodies in an exemplary manner that form of professional illustrator which gradually established itself in the twentieth centuy in the field of verbal-visual literature for children: that of an author capable of planning and managing every aspect of the literary work, from the general conception to the drafting of the texts, from the creation of the images to the graphic composition of the whole. By examining some of the author’s works, this contribution aims to show the variety of expressive tools Tan uses to give shape to his narratives, demonstrating how his inexhaustible path of expressive experimentation is never an end in itself but rather intimately linked to the nature of the pre-existing narrative materials with which the artist has been called upon to deal or with the seed-images from which, over the years, his original stories have germinated. Tan’s work of aesthetic exploration over the years demonstrates how visual discourse – in the world of illustrated books – can have an aesthetic dignity and semantic densi- ty that have nothing to envy to the finest literature, since it has to do with profound and meditated expressive and narrative needs, and not with mere exorbitant or commercial requirements.