As many of you – comics lovers and art buffs – will already know, Andrea Pazienza’s genius flew away one tragic evening in June, toward the Paradise of heroes, leaving us all a little lonelier and a little sadder. Now, it certainly won’t be me, who loves neither post-mortem rhetoric nor hagiographic holy cards, who writes here one of the many, and perhaps the latest, funeral orations. I could tell you about Andrea’s open and truly very generous character, his hospitality, his passion – which we jokingly called “a bit southern” – for big, wide cars. I could describe that likeable “machismo” of his, which on the page produced somewhat heavy and somewhat phallocratic lines, and which led him to frequent gyms, martial arts and skirts. I could tell you about that room of his in Bologna where, from his DAMS days to his days of fame, he went on living like an out-of-town student among aquariums with tropical fish, a few pin-up photos on the walls, his drawings, his family’s coat of arms, little succulent plants. I’d like to tell you about his voice, his rolled r’s, that nobly adenoidal Apulian pronunciation of his; about his gurgling laugh, his adolescent narcissism, his smile and also his beautiful physique.
Of course, I could tell you all this; but what I instead feel with dramatic urgency, against that bit of beatifying hypocrisy that understandably broke out at the news of his death, is a sort of existential dissonance, perhaps also political and generational. Because, and of this I am absolutely certain, Andrea Pazienza was able to represent, in life and also, sadly, in death, the destiny, the abstractions, the madness, the flair of a generation that only hastily, only summarily, we will call that of Bologna’s ’77. Of this “movement” Andrea – while feeling all the discomfort of taking an individual stance, as his first Pentothal pages show – was the bard, the poet, perhaps the greatest artist. (The other leading interpreters were Freak Antoni with the Skiantos and Enrico Palandri with Boccalone.) Barely twenty, Andrea found himself inside a certain university, a certain movement, and as an artist he soaked up its sayings, its slang, its political paranoias, its ways of life, grafting them onto a very great natural talent (which he constantly made fun of). Andrea did not find his artistic vocation with Bologna’s ’77, but he was able to give that movement his own interpretation, living it in the only way he could know: as an artist. But the point of my argument isn’t so much this. It’s that along with the vitality, the mockery, the provocation, the naivety, the “youthful pranks” of that movement, Andrea also absorbed the negative mythologies of the Seventies. Not so much on the political and militant front, as on the much broader one that we all passed through sooner or later, of slacking and lounging about. And so: earning a lot only to throw it all away, never thinking about the future, never making plans, never ever building a career (and in this Andrea, with all that huge talent of his that would have trounced any New York graffiti artist, was a true, great anti-master); having a horror of professional roles, identifying completely with the bohemian side of one’s artistic work, mixing life and art. Basically, playing with one’s talent as with Russian roulette. Mistreating it, throwing it away, impoverishing it, damning it, knowing you’d find it intact the next day, even more brilliant and dazzling. An unwillingness to grow up and accept the roles of adult society. This is what Andrea’s death mercilessly puts before me: the negative side of a culture and a generation that never really believed in anything but itself. Despite his success, despite the balance he had found – so his closest friends say – in the oasis of Montepulciano, despite the “settling down” of marriage, Andrea probably died of an overdose, like one of the countless young people of the Seventies, the very same young people whom he, better than anyone else, had portrayed with his characters, his stoners, his eternal kids. In all this, then, there is in my opinion an extraordinary greatness (even if built on the miseries of everyday life) and a coherence that only hypocrites can blame. This may sound like the speech of an undertaker. But I’m not afraid to make it. I wouldn’t throw away Jim Morrison, or Janis Joplin, just because their lives were hell. I wouldn’t throw away rock even though I know it has a “negative” soul of its own. I wouldn’t throw away art even though I know that, for artists, it is often a deadly damnation. Many others, victims and interpreters of those years, have disappeared. And year after year my little Bologna address book has macabre white spaces of crossings-out. Something was wrong back then, and it was the myth of self-destruction. Some got out of it, others didn’t. «Every life is the one it had to be», Pavese wrote. So praise be to those who are going before us up there.