Let’s start with a problem. Pazienza, Echaurren, Altan and Andrea Pazienza, two comic artists and an illustrator, are exhibiting their works in Rome. So it really does seem that something has changed. Minor art, like comics, always considered a non-art, is being reappraised. Perhaps even overrated. Is that so?

Pazienza: Yes, overrated; luckily, it’s an overrating that then doesn’t find fertile ground. I’m talking about the material, for example. Take the most beautiful comic, the least traditional, the richest in ideas and innovations. Very often it’s insensitive stuff, made with colors that don’t hold up to light, with water-based markers that fade after three months, full of patches and repairs. You can’t take it and put it in a frame. Partly because these things couldn’t care less about passing for works of art.

Echaurren: But we have to see whether that isn’t precisely the problem. There are, for example, people who want to create real separations, and try to reinvent Art with a capital A, paintings with Latin titles, fake 17th-century, Art Nouveau. I mean you can sense a separateness in communication. At this point I believe comics have a space too, because they’re often better able to convey the moods of a certain moment. Much more than big oil paintings.

Pazienza: And anyway I know that a comic artist, when he has to pick one of his own little images to blow up into a painting, does it with a certain shame. I mean: it’s true that today in Italy there are people who, at the very highest level, manage to pursue both things at the same time, with even very strange recognitions, I don’t know, Biennales, exhibitions at the Guggenheim. Marcello Jori is like that, and he’s done splendid things. He’s really the only Italian comics artist known in America. The only one. But, precisely, he’s always kept the two things separate. Whereas, in all honesty, that shouldn’t matter. It isn’t written anywhere. Nothing codifies illustration for illustration’s sake, comics for comics’ sake, painting for painting’s sake…

But there’s an underlying factor that conditions things: Pablo has tried his hand at covers, etc., Andrea at comics: products that will be seen by many, that will be printed, worked for print. Isn’t print a conditioning factor?

Pazienza: Not for me, not at all. Because despite all the necessities and needs, in the end the leap lies in drawing, in doing things you like first of all yourself. What Miller said about Kerouac holds. It’s not a quotation. It’s that if the author is involved and honest, the public senses it, and that’s the most important metacommunication.

Echaurren: But that doesn’t mean that, if the public senses it, they then live it.

Pazienza: What I mean is this: in my opinion you can work in three ways. With your head: you sit at the desk and plan the work. With your hand: you rely on your hand and produce something sufficiently precise. Or there’s a third way: using your solar plexus, with a system taken from Japanese martial arts. It’s a way of carrying things forward with your solar plexus, with your gut, viscerally, passionately, which leads to any kind of line. For me this last one gives the best results, because there’s no grim desire to please the public.

Echaurren: For me the point is that a painter makes a direct work, seen by a small public. When you work for reproduction, for a wider public, you have to be more precise, even at the expense of earnings. More precise not so much in the general idea, but technically.

Pazienza: It must be said, though, that if a comic artist is given the chance to do graphic design and has the right channels to promote himself, he can make good use of the situation. The drawings can become a story; with the addition of a poem or a caption it can become a book; the same story can be sold in France and so on.

But in short, do comics have something more than painting? Or can comics help make paintings?

Echaurren: It’s a broad subject. And not so much thinking of the strip, but of all graphic communication. In Italy there’s no real tradition, whereas elsewhere, for example in English-speaking countries, graphic design has a history behind it. People like Steinberg or Milton Glaser build a piece with a poster, then they can make a watercolor of it, without the dichotomies we have here.

Pazienza: Even if in Italy there actually is a class of new cartoonists that emerged perhaps two or three years ago, able to take on anything. Even if then someone like Jori ends up signing his comics with an acronym, so as not to confuse the two levels.

Comics as the painting of the future?

Echaurren: In part, perhaps yes. In any case, painting today is moving toward strong abstraction, recreating the myth of the pondering, somewhat accursed artist. Sometimes you read interviews that are frightening.

Pazienza: We have to bear in mind that there’s a public that looks at comics or record covers and is absolutely knowledgeable. It’s like an amoeba, without a head or a body, but it grows and can grasp a great many meanings and differences. So today there are also traditional cartoonists alongside those doing research, with antennae as efficient as possible. As long as things go this way, an advertising illustration or a comic will contain as many elements as it will be absolutely impossible to find in a contemporary work. Let me cite another case. If on the market, antiques or not, you find a Tintoretto for sale at 35 million, drawings by Bramante for less than 50, a Lorenzo Lotto at 75 and a Chia at 70, I think reality has really been lost sight of.

Post-avant-garde, post-catastrophe, post-private. Is there perhaps also a post-comic?

Pazienza: I know that once people looked to France and Spain. Now things have changed. In ’80 I went to the US to look for the sign of this decade, because I thought one couldn’t settle for the square or the triangle, as the American ads or comics I read suggested. It was an emancipation of the line in an alarming, closed direction. When I came back, I realized that maybe it’s better to be more individualistic and not trust fashions too much. Because if you work calmly, you always end up anticipating them. In practice, though, for two years I haven’t worked, or have worked very little.

Echaurren: I agree about fashions. I’d say that behind the current situation there’s a frightening host of people falling into line. Last year at Villa Ada, at the lost dance party, there was a little game where you had to type your profession into a computer. Once everyone would have said student. Instead they were all «artists».

Pazienza: The more the unemployed increase, the more artists there are…

Echaurren: It’s the Warhol phenomenon; everyone famous for 15 minutes. Today there’s a real, continuous rehashing of past tastes. The real avant-garde now is everyone minding their own business.

Cinema and comics, soap operas and comics. What are the relationships?

Pazienza: Very close. As far as comics are concerned, everyone knows how Lanciostory or Blizare used. And the same goes for soap operas.

Echaurren: Conversely, soap operas come from them.

Pazienza: And both come from the feuilleton. As for cinema, as someone who makes comics, I care a lot about the cinematic framing of my stories. Scozzari would say he’s the story writer, screenwriter, director, costume designer and lighting technician of his stories. Because if you do adventure stories you can really show how you set up the camera, how you move it, how you go into houses. It’s all there.

Young cartoonists, young writers: are there really many opportunities for young people working in comics?

Pazienza: Fewer and fewer. Today a top-level comic can basically only be made by a single person with the abilities of both a storyteller and an artist. And it’s not easy to have both abilities. Or it can come from the collaboration of two people who understand each other extremely well: kids collaborating; whereas there are no longer people like there used to be, who write their story separately, and then, after negotiating, it gets made. And then just think of all the kids coming out of art high school who think of becoming cartoonists and then, if they don’t make it, start painting… There are thousands and thousands of young people. And all of them just cartoonists.

Another theme that in some way unites you: both of you followed the ’77 movement very closely with your work. Echaurren at Lotta Continua and with the graphics of the now historic «Il pane e le rose» series. Pazienza, who had depicted the movement in Bologna, even had a furious row with Città futura about it. Let’s see: do you see any outcomes from that phase?

Pazienza: I remember perfectly the feeling I had in Bologna in ’78. I needed to carry on with that new way of being with people that I had experienced in ’77. Unfortunately, the designated places were no longer recognizable. Then, partly drugs, partly the need for money, partly the bosses who found big ambitions under their pillows, but with completely different ideas, in short everything became an old thing. But I’m always a musketeer by nature. I’m waiting for the phone to ring. I’m ready to throw myself into any undertaking that requires my help, and not only with drawing. In short, the thing most on my mind is taking to the streets. I really have action in mind, even though I detest every kind of bullying and oppression.

Echaurren: For me too times have changed and they’ve changed me. Back then what annoyed me most was the separateness of art. And I had decided to do a real job, to make a living with markers. At the same time another idea also took hold: that creativity could spread and, after all, change things. At least, one sector thought so: that there was no longer politics, that only irony counted, and that you could play with things. And no more avalanches of quotations from the Grundrisse . In reality, Andrea is right when he says there were people chasing dreams of glory. There, that also explains the return of some to «priestly» art and the killing of irony. But here in Italy irony, Voltaire’s irony, is difficult. My disappointment is this: that the opportunity was lost to get fun, color and play past the ponderousness and the «ecclesiastical».