By chance, from the bottom of the bag, a Marker pen popped out. Andrea grabbed it on the fly with a cry of joy: “A Marker! You’ve still got a Marker! You know they don’t make them anymore…”
It was a big felt-tip pen with a very hard fiber tip, black ink and a round point. Taking a sheet of paper, Andrea began to run the elastic tip over it, to catch its sound, to modulate its line. He was very excited. The great painters of the past came to mind: surely Antonello or Piero or Caravaggio reacted like him to a brush made from the hairs of some unobtainable marten, or to rare colored earths from faraway lands. Instead it was a felt-tip pen. A cold tool designed and produced to mark prices indelibly on plastic surfaces. In Andrea’s hands it came to life and rose to the dignity of an artist’s tool.
I tell this because I’m sure it offers one more key to understanding Andrea’s still so unexplored greatness. As in a fourteenth-century workshop, he measured and probed all the expressive possibilities of all the languages and materials in widest everyday use. His pages are made with Marker, Grinta, Stabilo F, Pantone, Uniposca, but also (let’s make the academics happy) oils, temperas and watercolors. Perhaps it’s also for this reason, for this provocative and passionate contamination of genres and techniques, that obtuse Culture with a capital “C” still looks down on him. And yet, with all due respect to these gentlemen, an artist is someone who, with an innovative line, manages to synthesize the moods, tensions, ideals and anxieties of his time, which is exactly what Andrea did. Just as, before him, Antonello, Piero, Caravaggio had done… even if, poor things, they didn’t know Markers.
There, if I were a believer, I’d like to imagine Andrea, in other realms, explaining to an enthusiastic Caravaggio the infinite potential of a Marker pen…