Paz, a life in a mural | Guido Piccoli

Paz loved Naples. Unreliable and chaotic, just like him. He went there every year during his last years, mostly at the invitation of the Comics Fair (Comics Fair), which can rightly be called the father, or mother, of Comicon. An event where comics and the people who make them truly mattered, not yet smothered and sidelined by cosplay costumes, as happens in these bleak times.

The catalog of the 4^th Naples Comics Fair
announces a performance by Andrea Pazienza

Before moving to the cramped yet wonderful setting of Castel dell’Ovo, the Fair livened up the springs of the vast, bare pavilions of the Mostra d’Oltremare. That year (it was 1987) Paz arrived together with Pratt and Manara, Bilal and Muñoz and many others: in short, the cream of European, and perhaps world, comics. «Andrea, you have a suite at the five-star hotel on Via Caracciolo, facing the sea and the castle», he was told, to lure and flatter him. And he came and, very much in character, went to the wrong hotel, ending up in the one next door, just as beautiful and terribly expensive (but these were the famous ’80s of “spend, spend, spend”…). As co-director of the Fair, I found out a couple of days later, by which time he had already caused various mishaps with the Jacuzzi and, like a true star, completely emptied the well-stocked minibar. Scolded without ceremony (given how close we were), Paz wanted to make amends, and so, one Saturday afternoon, he decided to show the very best of himself by painting that marvelous mural on the wall of a shabby  pavilion. He made that seven-by-three-meter fresco, depicting a battle among men, lions, tigers, vultures, antelopes, horses and whatever else, using big markers and brushes. All without pausing, without stopping to check, without stepping back to take measurements, without imagining an ending. And he did it in front of a silent, astonished crowd of admirers, among them Tanino Liberatore and Milo Manara (who that year had driven down from S. Ambrogio di Valpolicella to Naples in his camper, just to make a triumphant entrance into the pavilion dedicated to “HP and Giuseppe Bergman”). That is how one of the masterpieces of contemporary art came to be; only some fifteen years later was it rescued and moved to a more dignified and secure space, still within the Mostra (though it deserves something better still). That battle looks like a snapshot of his short life. A great melee of contradictions and interlocking pieces, lived without pausing, without thinking twice, without stopping to reason. Without imagining the ending that would arrive, punctual and relentless, less than a year later, in Montepulciano on the night of June 16, 1988.  

Frames from the video by Luigi Bontà Polito

The restoration of the mural | Michele Mordente

In early 2010, while the young Neapolitan restorers Barbara Balbi and Annalisa Milella were working on some restorations inside the Mostra d’Oltremare, they learned of the existence of a mural by Andrea Pazienza in one of the exhibition pavilions. The architect Rosanna Milano showed them where the work was located, hidden and protected by a kind of box made of plasterboard panels. After removing some of these, the restorers found the work in a state of severe deterioration, due to deep cracks in the plaster that had caused parts of the surface to fall away. The restorers immediately set about obtaining the necessary authorization to restore the painting and securing funds to cover the cost of materials and the new support structure, having established that, to safeguard the work, it had to be detached from its original wall support.

Enrico Pazienza describes his son Andrea’s mural

In spring 2010 the restoration finally began, under the direction of the architect Marisa Zuccaro, technical and architectural director of the Mostra d’Oltremare until 2013. The preliminary step, needed to hold together and protect the parts of the surface at risk of detaching, is facing, i.e. the application of thin sheets of Japanese paper with an acrylic resin. Next came the first actual restoration treatment: consolidating the fine plaster layer with a product based on ventilated mortars. Then, to ensure the stability of the paint layer, the entire surface was faced with medium-weight Japanese paper applied with a low-dilution aqueous resin. To carry out the so-called “strappo” (stripping), the whole surface of the work was given a double bandage of animal glue, an adhesive of animal origin that penetrates deeply and makes the plaster thick and elastic. Then came the delicate operation of detaching the surface layer of plaster from the load-bearing wall. Because of the work’s considerable size, the surface was divided into several sections. The painted plaster, detached from the wall, was fixed onto a new support of fiberglass panels with an internal honeycomb structure, sturdy and lightweight at the same time, previously covered with a bed of mortar, but only after the back of the detached plaster had been cleaned and thinned. The panels were then fixed onto a solid metal support structure designed by the architect Milano. Once the protective facing had been carefully removed, the gaps in the fine plaster were filled with mortars of the same color and grain size. The fillings and the losses in the paint film were then chromatically reintegrated with restoration watercolors. At last, after many months of work, Andrea Pazienza’s battle was restored to its original splendor and could once again be shown to its devoted audience, in the Latin America pavilion of the Mostra d’Oltremare, thanks to the tenacity and skill of the two Neapolitan restorers.

Images from the restoration