CRUMBS OF PAZIENZA

When talking about Andrea Pazienza it’s impossible to get by with a few words; there’s always something else to say. But speaking requires firmness. Because he inevitably reappears, and in memory he’s the only one talking, he overwhelms us, often and willingly changing the rules of the game. The catalog of his great exhibition, curated by his siblings Mariella and Michele Pazienza and by his close friend Vincenzo Mollica, held at Palazzo Re Enzo in Bologna from October 5 to November 16 and soon expected in Turin, is a very valuable first aid for beginning to make one’s way through a forest of throbbing contradictions. Andrea Pazienza, in fact, contradicted himself vehemently, but he was capable of alternately upholding the opposite of the opposite. For him that’s how it was; there were no obstacles. Today, after contemplating and admiring Andrea Pazienza’s masterpieces in person, the catalog offers the cue for studying more consciously an extraordinary graphic body of work. And admiration grows, because even the lapses of taste, the vulgarities and even the obscenities are transformed. Andrea Pazienza was a Prodigal Son, dearly loved by his father, a very fine artist. Anyone who has not seen Enrico Pazienza’s watercolors is missing one of Andrea Pazienza’s secrets. They are paintings for which it is right to use the word «ineffable». The color has the strength to move and the gentleness to persuade. It is a divine gift for Enrico Pazienza to have a son who immediately shows a gift for drawing.
The most loving father, who taught art at the middle school in San Severo, had his son enrolled in his class to follow him more closely, but then tormented himself for three years over the dilemma of whether it was honest to reward Andrea’s skill with a ten or whether he had better wrong Andrea by unfairly preferring someone else. In drawing there was no one as good as Andrea. And out of love for his father Andrea Pazienza tried to play the model student, despite the restlessness that made him quiver. A restlessness for freedom, revelations, novelty, temptations.
But then Andrea Pazienza passed with full marks and went to the art high school in Pescara and, for lodging, ended up as a boarder at the Jesuit college, and a lot changed for him. Even before his lifestyle, his way of drawing changed. Though far away, his father Enrico noticed, and there were explanations asked and not given, or given and not asked. It was a separation more artistic than sentimental, at least at first. A question of line, comics against graphic art; only little by little at first, then dizzyingly, Andrea’s character prevailed, his desire to react to the ugliness of life with maximum energy and transgression, even at the cost of shortening his own existence, a true vocation even.
«Before making comics I painted paintings of social protest» is a statement by Andrea Pazienza. «Those were times when I couldn’t help doing that. But my paintings were bought by pharmacists who hung them in their bedrooms. The fact that the painting kept pulsing in that setting seemed to me a contradiction, and also an enormous limitation. Hence my desire to make comics. My first comics, then, Pentothal for example, act as a link between the work of an artist and that of a comic artist…». And again: «I was a very obnoxious enfant prodige, but luckily I was also such a little rascal that I managed to overturn somewhat the sort of automatic dislike people feel for this kind of riffraff, child prodigies. I was an enfant prodige at drawing, but if I go back and look at my things I don’t seem that exceptional, and not out of modesty, but because in fact they seem unexceptional things to me in the truest sense of the word. And so I think I probably also had an artist father around who weaned me, because I breathed the air of watercolor, that’s all…».
That’s all, but it’s no small thing. From this and other very lucid notes, Andrea Pazienza shows that he thinks exactly like his father regarding the difference between painting and comics. The difference is undeniable, like that between art and craft. Andrea Pazienza takes care to justify the move to a lower dimension, and he doesn’t argue in the least about this lowness. It is circumstances that impose his decision: «The end of ’76 finds me, well, perhaps above all, certainly without money; the need to earn money, to support myself, not to weigh on the shoulders of my already strained family, becomes pressing; I absolutely have to solve somehow what has become a big problem for me, and so I start drawing. Of course I don’t improvise as a cartoonist, since I had long been dabbling with markers, pencil, eraser…». These are respectable justifications to present to his father too. To his father, above all!
But when he finds himself engaged in the new undertaking of drawing no longer for fun but out of duty, he goes on to face the matter as an adventure. The adventure of cultural comics. Comics and culture are terms that to most people seem hardly compatible. The word comic is used as a derogatory term for a poor-quality work, whether narrative, a novel or a film; it is the accusation, the trial and the sentence proving an immaturity and coarseness typical of a subgenre unfortunately very widespread among the rabble. While distinguishing with paternal rigor the difference between painting and comics, between art and craft, Andrea Pazienza throws himself cheerfully and furiously into embellishing what seems to him an absolute poverty, a void to be filled as best he can. He throws everything into it for an urgent contamination: pop art and interior monologue, elliptical narration, cut-up, avant-gardes and rearguards, Mickey Mouse included, and heroin, lots of heroin. And comics catch the contagion, grow in content and feeling, become ever more ambitious and compelling, even threaten the reader’s balance, and there they are, closer than ever, dangerously approaching art. «My love for markers» confesses Andrea Pazienza «is second only to the love I have for myself. A marker is beautiful, and if you know how to use it, if you love it, it can give you satisfaction…».
«A strong and at the same time light thought runs through Pazienza’s work, writes Achille Bonito Oliva in the exhibition catalog», that of Nietzsche, whose fragmentary structure he also adopts. Just as the German philosopher proceeds by aphorisms, so he adopts an idea of splintered, exploded space, subjected to many twists and tensions that refer to a space not only typological but psychological, which tends to break out of every orbit delimited by the frame. The work becomes a combat route beyond any hope of harmony and quiet «is the great art critic’s felicitous insight». Pazienza’s fragmentariness is the symptom of a mentality that does not want to set one order against another, but instead intends to take advantage of the crisis of ideology to highlight the reasons of a self that is enriched through permanent conflict with history…».