Franco Matticchio is an Italian painter and illustrator whose work appears leading newspapers and magazines around the world. His work is almost instantly recognisable – the faces of Matticchio's women characters in particular are serious and enigmatic, often captured immediately on any paper medium that comes to hand, from an envelope to the page of a book or The New Yorker. They collected in this volume, Women.

These are the faces Matticchio meets on the street, at the station, those he observes in everyday life and which accumulate and overlap in his personal visual imagination. Over the years the illustrator continues to return to what seems inexhaustible subject for him, using every means – pastels, watercolours, acrylics or even simply an ink pen or a pencil, always placing these figures on neutral backgrounds or in bare environments without temporal references.

Inevitably the artist has created a veritable collection of female faces, almost never commissioned and mostly unpublished: a large body of drawings in which he presents himself solely as a fascinated and discreet observer of the profound and mysterious complexity of the female soul.

Lazy Dog, 80pp, 14cm x 18cm, Illustrated hardback, Eng/Italian text, 2019 first edition