Like a for­bid­den fruit, the olive will be the cen­ter of atten­tion in Italian artist’s Valerio Marini’s lat­est exhi­bi­tion, appro­pri­ately titled ​“Erotic Oil.“



The exhi­bi­tion will take place at the Olio Officina Food Festival in Milan, an event devel­oped by jour­nal­ist Luigi Caricato and devoted to the pro­mo­tion and cel­e­bra­tion of extra vir­gin olive oil.

Born in Gallarate, near Varese, in 1950, Marini con­sid­ers him­self a humorist-illus­tra­tor. Cartoonist for the Il Giornale until 1994, then for Italia Oggi and La Gazzetta dello Sport and many oth­ers, he’s been col­lab­o­rat­ing with Olio Officina since it began in 2010.

Marini makes our imag­i­na­tions’ run wild as we try to imag­ine how olive oil and eroti­cism might be linked, but as any great artist would have it, the sim­ple innu­en­dos and tan­ta­liz­ing provo­ca­tions help us make our own deci­sions on the con­nec­tion. The options are never end­ing.

Valerio Marini

The inven­tive­ness of Valerio Marini cap­tures atten­tion with sug­ges­tive illus­tra­tions con­tain­ing sub­tle clues such as using the shape of the cus­tom­ary blue olive oil tast­ing glass and trans­form­ing it into the der­riere of a lady seen from behind. This par­tic­u­lar piece of work goes hand in hand with his catch­phrase for the exhi­bi­tion ​“Oil feeds our Eros.”

In another of Marini’s witty art­works, which will be present at the exhi­bi­tion, women’s lin­gerie are hang­ing on a wash­ing line tied between the branches of two olive trees. He comes up with every pos­si­bil­ity to evoke the olive as a sen­sual fruit. From the olive tree, the fruit itself and to the oil it pro­duces, for Marini it all falls under the cat­e­gory of seduc­tion.


At the sec­ond edi­tion of Olio Officina in 2013, Marini pre­sented illus­tra­tions made at the time cel­e­brat­ing Eros. Now for the fourth edi­tion, with the theme ​“Oil feeds our Eros,” he offers more sen­sual illus­tra­tions.

In Olio Officina mag­a­zine two of his car­toons have been pub­lished, using the phrase: ​“We are just at the pre­lim­i­nar­ies…” lead­ing us to won­der where the artist will go next.

The exhi­bi­tion will take place at the Olio Officina Food Festival from January 22 to 24, 2015.