From October 3, 1995 to January 7, 1996, I presented at the Centre Belge de la Bande Dessinée in Brussels a retrospective exhibition devoted to Andrea Pazienza, entitled Di me amate il riflesso(Love my reflection). The reasons that led me to decide to organize this exhibition are many: the importance of the work and its meaning, the diversity of the talent (comics, illustration, painting, poetry, posters, fashion drawing, set design, animation, political cartoons and social satire…), the personality of the artist who produced it, the Belgian public’s ignorance of both the work and the artist… I would like to go back over these reasons here in a little more detail. To the great shame of all Belgians who believe themselves connoisseurs of the graphic arts because they were born in the land of Hergé, Andrea Pazienza, an Italian comics artist and cartoonist, held in even higher esteem in his own country than Hugo Pratt, Crepax, Manara or Liberatore, was and still is totally and scandalously ignored in Belgium.
His work has nonetheless been shown in the most prestigious Italian venues: in Rome at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, in Siena at the Magazzini del Sale, in Florence, in Milan… but there’s no need to feel guilty, because if we share our admission of ignorance with the rest of the French-speaking public, the picture will be more complete. Besides, didn’t an Italian recently confess to me that Italians themselves believe they know everything about the history of painting because they were born under the same sky as Leonardo?! Like every important artist, Andrea Pazienza was able not only to absorb the spirit of his time, but also to give it back in an immediately recognizable way, through and for the widest public: in it, for example, we find the Italian student movement of 1977. Andrea Pazienza offers his generation a disenchanted and ironic autobiography whose most ridiculous and at the same time most dramatic aspects he accentuates with masochistic pleasure. The magnifying-glass effect reveals a rather unamusing reality: Italy seems populated only by completely negative characters, cowardly, weak, violent, treacherous, murderers, drug addicts, thieves, parasites… and yet perfectly integrated into a society that is living through the transition from the ’70s to the ’80s with such difficulty. Very soon, however, it becomes clear that the main character of Andrea Pazienza’s stories is none other than Andrea Pazienza himself, represented in so many different and apparently contradictory facets. Aware that Andrea’s work is nothing but the fragmentation of his portrait, ranging from caricature to idealization, his family had at first considered the idea of titling the exhibition “a single multitude”, referring to the great Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, the archetypal champion of multiple personalities.
Like Pessoa, Pazienza played tirelessly with his name and multiplied pseudonyms, the better to give the floor to the different people who lived inside him, or into whom he liked to project himself: Paz, Apaz, Spaz, Andrebius, Andrei Invacanza, Andrenza… “Di me amate il riflesso” nevertheless seemed to me more appropriate as the title of a retrospective devoted to Andrea Pazienza, because these are words that sprang from his own pen. In the comics poem from which the line in question is taken, he asks the reader and the “human brothers who live after him” (thank you, Villon) to love the image they have kept of him, beyond all the characters he played on the stage of life, even if this image is nothing but a simple “buoy marking the submerged continent”.
It is in fact this need for love in his weakness that makes Andrea Pazienza’s strength, a human being always in pursuit of a possible overflowing of himself, through himself. Always fragile beneath this brute force, yet always strong in this intimate fragility. Andrea Pazienza’s ultimate and precious secret, buried with a thousand precautions beneath the striking, even histrionic display of his astonishing mastery of every artistic technique, is the very reason why we can love him: he was a poet.