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Rating: <<My name is Andrea Michele Vincenzo Ciro, Pazienza, I am twenty-four years old, I am one meter and eighty-six centimeters tall and weigh seventy-five kilograms.[...] I have been drawing since I was eighteen months old, I can draw anything, in any way.[...] Since '75 I have been living in Bologna. I was registered from '71 to '73 with the Marxist-Leninists. I am nearsighted, have a slight squint, a few decayed molars never treated. I smoke very little. I shave every three days, wash my hair very often and in winter always wear gloves.[...] Since 'seventy-six I have been publishing in some magazines. I draw little and reluctantly. I am the greatest living draughtsman. I will die on January 6, 1984>>.
He was wrong by 4 years. Not a lot, after all. Andrea Pazienza passed away in 1988, taking with him one of the most creative minds that comic art has ever known. For me, Andrea Pazienza has always been a legend. As a person, for his political ideas, for his boldness in talking about any subject without self-censorship, if you will, without shame, for his desecrating any public figure without the slightest fear. And then as an artist of indescribable talent, eclectic, outside any scheme and regulation of drawing.
I have always loved his madness on paper in an indescribable way, the submission of pages on graph paper filled with notes and doodles in the margins, his mixed techniques on the same page, his thousands of pseudonyms with which he loved to sign (Spaz, Paperenza, Andrenza, Andrea Fazenda, and many, many others), his way of building pages down to the tiniest details, as if instead of a pencil there was a movie camera.
This anthology, curated by Vincenzo Mollica, is a unique value text for those who admire the author. A true cauldron of writings and more or less unpublished pages that reveal more incisively just how truly Andrea was a well-rounded artist, with a tormented and complex soul.
In the first part, we find the spurious cartoons, some that have become famous over the years (such as the one about those smoked in the ravine, or the crazy horse shouting "basta con la squola, viva la figha!"), joined by other unpublished ones. The themes covered in the cartoons are among the most varied: sex, politics, education, religion, drugs, crazy and ironic visions at the same time. Depending on the theme, the marker stroke changes, now veering toward a more cartoonish style, now towards a mature and serious stroke, or a strange mixture of refined strokes and nervous sketches.
The vignette compendium is followed by a very interesting piece of writing by Pazienza himself in which he talks about the genesis of his passion, his artistic maturation, with various reflections on his stylistic choices depending on the pages and digressions on the importance of the sign and the stroke.
Further on, we also find "The First of the Three," an episode from the fantastic cycle dedicated to Massimo Zanardi and his exploits. And it is precisely in this episode, in black and white unlike others in the series, that this strange mixture of styles emerges, surely representing Pazienza's trademark. Inks, pencils, markers come together in an artistic orgy within the pages that appear absurd, hallucinated, incomprehensible at first glance. But it is with these techniques that the author highlights concepts, strengthens images, lightens situations, and weaves the threads of the story: it is the approach of comics to a new experience. More than simple boards, synesthesias on paper.
In the book, we also find a series of unpublished poems by Pazienza, with a varied theme but highlighting the complex personality of Andrea: they are cryptic poems, at times bordering on absurdity, at times nonsense, not lacking moments of sweetness and anger. Then follows the comic story "Small Reasoned Guide to the West" and "A Summer," a splendid comic on the (mental) sexual initiation of a teenager during a scorching summer afternoon.
To close the booklet, a previously unpublished story of Zanardi, a treatise by Pazienza on the sign, and a story by Stefano Benni.
A strongly recommended work to explore in depth the complexity of an artist who better than anyone else has managed to imprint a generation, a page of the history of our country, a culture, and a society on paper, which thanks to his pages gains ample breathing space to this day. But also an important opportunity to get to know closely the one who, before being an artist, is a tormented, damned boy, brilliant in his madness and contradictions.
Tato my snow plants
I fly over your anxieties
pour out love on my limbs
and are moved to make me die
I wish you would not look at me captivated
you would become practical for a moment
you can't tell me to treasure
do what you want
I need to feel guided
by your fantasy of a woman who knows
I return to a time drunk
of your soft skin
when for a precious smile of yours I was willing
to give up the best part of me
when for your eyes of nothing
I trailed idiot and tired
when for all the people
I was a solitary
holy acrobat
for never having asked you anything
beyond your dimension
catastrophic and ridiculous together
of a rich girl well-behaved girl
now my vein is exhausted
I swear I dare not speak
to hurt you just for a good moment
to make you understand, to manage to love
I asked for money from my executioners
I asked on my knees for a month's time
my promises I've kept again
of your infidelity I am monastic temple
I really couldn't continue
feigning myself again as a merchant of boredom
it's sold by weight or by square meter
in my soul it's a true mess
I'm still willing to one thing love
old young vamp
to retouch your myth of glory
at the hidden altar of cowardice
to console myself by observing the image
of your dizzying hair
of the sacred bibles of your breast
which too often I have confused with God.
(Andrea Pazienza, 1974)
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