4 out of 5

A wordless, black and white tale of the inevitable, Marco Fontanili’s oversized production ‘Home’ is a surreal depiction of a waking nightmare: a wartime survivor who keeps dreaming of death, on his way “home” to, presumably the same.

Fontanili’s thick, angled scrabbles are done in de Goya etched-from-darkness duotone, with the artist allowing for ink-spattered feathering throughout, to give it all a further grainy, nightmarish quality. Our lead solider just reeks of sleeplessness and exhaustion from the tone of the art, but it’s further by the pose of their body, dragging themselves across a wasteland, and told in the environment – all creaky branches and half-destroyed building – and the lead’s attire of bedraggled clothing and broken gasmask they choose to don.

You can stew in the pages for quite a while, definitely because of the large size (this is like 24″ x 18″ or something), but also thanks to Fontanili’s spidery lines, which for me, edges out other sketchy artists like Ashley Wood as Fontanili’s always grounds us with a setting, and provides focus with a base of solid lines.

Assuming I’m close with my understanding of the silently-told story, the one thing I couldn’t quite figure is what was being represented when we see what’s behind the mask, as the effect Fontanili uses isn’t quite so drastically different from their already scritchy-scratchy style, so that reveal maybe loses some impact. But the positive reaction to that is I did not mind flipping back through this multiple times, studying the pages – pacing, framing – to see if I could glean a little bit more about the story each time.