Andrea Pazienza
Cannibale

I am certainly not a fan of comics, manga, or films, and my limited knowledge in all of this does not correspond to a sort of disdain for these arts. For example, at the beginning of the 20th century, there was a debate on the value of one art form over another, the power of silent cinema, or the need to enrich the film with sounds that explained what the image could not describe.

The passion for music symbolizes my lifestyle and the easiest way to let the mind travel while looking at a landscape, a sunset, or even a white wall. Sometimes, however, strange encounters happen. A new light that ignites a glimmer in total darkness. The darkest shadow corresponds to the comics I've barely touched with a few issues of Tex and Dylan Dog. Certainly aided by the social, historical, and artistic context that colors the world of the artist in question, I fell in love with Andrea Pazienza and the phantasmagoric editorial team of Frigidaire.

We are in the mid-fifties, and wild Puglia gives birth to a brilliant cartoonist, and much more, who twenty years later moves to Pescara, where he meets Tanino Liberatore, another great free spirit. The fundamental stop is certainly Bologna, inflamed by the movement of 1977, full of sensations, emotions, anger, fears, doubts, and excesses; his vision of the world, life, and society slowly forms.

Also in that turbulent year, the magazine “Cannibale” was founded by Stefano Tamburini, Massimo Mattioli, Tanino Liberatore, and Filippo Scozzari. Andrea also collaborates with “Il Male” by Vincenzo Sparagna, and in 1980, “Frigidaire” is born. This latter magazine marks an important step for Pazienza's art, so much so that the famous “Zanardi” appears in its pages. I don't want to talk about this character right away but start discussing Andrea's early works, those created between 1976 and 1981.

These initial inventions all came out on “Cannibale” and represent a beautiful testimony of his free, independent, and unconventional vision. It's difficult to describe in words a sound, a song, let alone a vignette that needs to be observed closely. I have the “Cannibale” collection in front of me, and already with the sketches of “La Scuola,” one quickly understands the abstraction of the dialogues, the free interpretation left to the reader, and a brilliant color work.

Andrea wants to sculpt everyday life, the most subtle dimension of the human soul, what escapes and what annihilates us. The provocative background that challenges hypocritical, narrow-minded thinkers is more powerful than a war. “Allegro Con Fuoco” draws a parallel between an alien's view of our social life and a simple betrayal of a young couple. “Perché Pippo Sembra Uno Sballato,” “Prixicel!,” “Agnus Dei,” “Mondo Acido,” “Ma Cosa Succede?” are the triumph of highness, obscenity, and excitement.

Andrea wants to focus on society's lifestyles, without filters, often turning people into funny, clumsy creatures, pseudo-futuristic monsters (stylistic features definitively consecrated by the cyborg theater of “Ranxerox”). What is understood from his persistence in depicting the world of drugs is representing the users and the substance itself as caricatures, where there's not much to condemn, except understanding our affliction by a mix of playfulness, seriousness, fears, and freedom.

We arrive at "Francesco Stella," "Il Partigiano," and "Aficionados," where the political sphere is tasted with a parodic, comically tragic, and at times sacrilegious view. Here the comics are black and white, but the realism, the pathos of the images, the figures, the precise lines of an individual, as if it were a photograph, are the winning card, the signal of genius. The mockery of the seriousness of political alignments, the life endangered by war, spiced not only with fear but also with blunders, amusements, and comedic soldier theater, give a different weight to the world's life.

If we had to live in a Panic comic, we would experience terror mixed with peace with an almost always fair conclusion for the role played. There is no thirst for morality or justice between the good or the bad. Observing his vignettes, it becomes clear that each of us plays a character with a purpose that needs to be deciphered and identified.

The Catholic vision describes the end of an existence as reaching a perfect form that finds continuation in the afterlife. I often reflect on this when I find myself thinking of a person who is no longer here. Andrea disappeared in 1988 due to a heroin overdose, a lament described in a raw but lucid manner in “Pompeo,” his last work equivalent to a testament. There is no sadness or happiness; one always finds themselves in a sort of limbo, where there is no clear path dictated by some unknown preacher. Andrea always leaves us with free will in the images we scroll through the pages.