For the twelfth edition of the Taormina Jazz Festival, visual art once again takes center stage with the unmistakable signature of Antonio Forlin, a Sicilian artist and founder of Don Corleone, the most vibrant and colorful creative lab in Taormina. It’s a space where local craftsmanship is reimagined with irony, pop style, and a free spirit—playfully blending tradition and contemporary culture in unexpected ways.
As per tradition, Forlin is the author of the festival’s official artwork, which for 2025 features a jazz ensemble rendered in his signature pop-naïf style: intense faces, bold colors, lively textures, and that unique sense of irony that defines each of his works. In the illustrated scene, the musicians emerge from a dreamlike theatrical stage: saxophones, pianos, guitars, and focused expressions turn the imaginary stage into an explosion of rhythm and imagination. It’s an illustration that doesn’t just represent jazz—it interprets it, through a visual language made of color, movement, and culture.
The deliberately imperfect, almost childlike style breaks with all formalism and brings the audience closer to the true essence of jazz: improvisation, humanity, and freedom.
Antonio Forlin’s art is made of intuition, freedom, and improvisation—just like jazz music, which can make any moment magical without ever following a set score.
The Taormina Jazz Festival 2024 is not just a music event: it’s a multisensory experience, where sound meets image, and every form of art becomes part of the same harmony.
Don Corleone: pop art, irony, and ceramics made in Sicily
Antonio Forlin is also the heart and soul of Don Corleone, a space that is much more than a workshop: it’s a world where Sicilian ceramics are reinterpreted with wit and brilliance. A place where craftsmanship doesn’t take itself too seriously—but takes creativity very seriously. Here, traditional Moorish heads become pop icons, colors burst beyond their forms, and every object tells a story made of Sicily, cinema, irony, and personal vision. Don Corleone is a tribute to creative freedom, where imperfection becomes personality, and tradition bends lightly into a new, surprising, and never dull aesthetic.
It is within this visual universe—ironic, cultured, and immediate—that the imagery of the Taormina Jazz Festival is born. Because Forlin doesn’t illustrate reality: he reinvents it with the same rebellious spirit of jazz.
