Marcello Jori said of him that “He tackled the paper without preparation, everything was born by magic”. A memory of Andrea Pazienza
And since my greatest current torment is being able to walk around my study without kicking the very messy piles of books and magazines that have crowded onto the floor in recent months, it is no less strange that at a certain point I found myself in hand un luxurious issue of Linus published by Elisabetta Sgarbi and directed by Igort who had remained hidden in one of those piles. The almost monographic issue dedicated by Igort to the great Andrea Pazienza in June last year.
I’m talking about it because I’m obsessed with Pazienza and his brief yet compelling creative saga (he died at the age of thirty-two 35 years ago). Whoever enters my house immediately bumps into a couple of posters hanging on the walls that Pazienza had designed to promote cultural events of the 1980s. My friends at the bibliographic studio L’Arengario in Brescia are preparing an exhibition for the month of May dedicated to the Bolognese years of Pazienza, someone who studied at the Dams in Bologna where a generation of Italian students learned to spell modern. It was Arengario who published a corpulent catalog of editorial delicacies branded by Pazienza in 2016, on which I catapulted myself to grab as many as possible. I see that on Wikipedia there is one of the photos that accompanied one of my articles from December 1980 in the European newspaper resulting from a visit to the then Roman editorial office of Frigidaire which was not far from the Regina Coeli prison, and is a photo in which Vincenzo Sparagna, Pazienza and Stefano Tamburini stand next to each other, the three main protagonists of the adventure of that memorable monthly. After having had to sell his house in Rome to pay off some of the debts of the magazine he founded and directed, Sparagna has now moved to the province of the so-called Republic of Frigolandia. Tamburini died of an overdose at the age of thirty-one in 1986, the same death that would kill Pazienza two years later, in 1988. “I have never known another natural talent like Pazienza, to whom everything about drawing came very easily”, Vittorio Giardino once said, another giant of modern Italian comics. Those who knew him and frequented him say that for Pazienza, living and describing the world through talking clouds were one and the same. He drew, drew, drew – always at first sight, at first glance, because he wouldn’t have come up with a better one -, only to then perhaps leave his works on the table as if he didn’t care at all about their fate, the important thing was to have created them. Giorgio Carpinteri, another shining star among Frigidaire’s comic book narrators, says that he once saw one of those drawings abandoned on a table and asked Pazienza if he could take it. “Of course,” the author of Penthotal replied. If you try to find on the paper of a book or a magazine the exemplary situations and characters of that Italian Seventy-seven of which Bologna was the natural capital, it is to Pazienza and its disheveled characters that you must turn to the way you would enter a temple . Even more to him than to the exquisite novels of a writer born in the province of Reggio Emilia and almost the same age as Pazienza such as Pier Vittorio Tondelli.
In the issue of Linus from which I started, a side of Pazienza’s work which at the time I was immediately fascinated by was very well described. His work as creator/designer of vinyl covers emanating from musical groups culturally close to him, the kind of work that in the last century had typical leaders such as Guido Crepax in Italy and Andy Warhol in the USA. Pazienza was particularly assiduous in illustrating Roberto Vecchioni’s 33 rpm vinyl records one after the other in the early 1980s, a relationship between the two which Camilla Baresani writes about at length in the Linus issue. Even if perhaps his most famous vinyl cover is the one that seems to put you against the wall in announcing a record by Premiata Forneria Marconi, Passpartù from 1978, from how on that cover the members of the famous musical team tell you they look to judge if you will be worthy of the music they are about to offer you. The original plate of that fateful cover was put up for sale in a Roman auction in which I participated, about ten or more years ago. Francesco Coniglio was next to me, the inexhaustible little great publisher who dedicated so much of his thirty-year career to those tangles between music and graphics and collecting and even up to a few days before his death.
Carpinteri said that once in Bologna they were drawing next to each other and that Pazienza was two panels away from finishing his story. “Come on Giorgio, have a coffee,” he told him. The time to prepare it and the two tables were already finished. Another Bolognese illustrator with whom Pazienza got along well was Marcello Jori (born in 1951 and also graduated from Dams) with whom they went together by train to the Milanese editorial office of Linus to deliver their comics. And until Betta, Pazienza’s longtime girlfriend, left him and got together with Jori, whereupon Pazienza threw away a story that he had drawn and of which Jori was the protagonist. Jori wrote about Pazienza in the Linus we are talking about: “He said that with Pantone he had managed to do everything he wanted, an apparently cold and technical medium that transformed in his hands. He was a Pantone player. He tackled the paper without preparation, everything was born by magic. Human beings, animals, environments, architecture… It was magic, spectacle. He was a unique human specimen, I’ve never met anyone who looked like him in any way. An unrepeatable person.”
