In the Eternity of His Life: On Vittorio Scarpati, Joy, and Love

Positano smells of the sour yellow of the lemons left rotting on the edge of walkways, it tastes of the sweet purple of the bougainvillea which bloom in the crispy October air, it sounds calm as the white foam wrinkling the sea when the wind caresses it. The houses lay almost vertical on the slopes of the Lattari mountains, staircases guide you up and down each terrace—the view pairs with infinite.

I imagine Vittorio Scarpati growing up here, his family having a farm with pigs; I imagine him climbing up the cliffs, riding an overused bus on his way to Napoli—where he studied at the Fine Art Academy. Yet, I abstain from the utopian image such a portrait could suggest. There is a gloomy face which sometimes surfaces the coast, it lies in the friction and the roughness of its highs and lows—as when you can glimpse hell out of heaven, in the words of Giovanni, a fisherman living for 80 years in Praiano.

Vittorio Scarpati and Cookie Mueller met there in 1983, and then again in 1984 when she rented the gardener’s quarters of an estate once owned by filmmaker Vittorio De Sica. Arturo Cirillo, an Italian actor and theater director, 15 years old back then, spent the summer with them and their group of friends. His eyes were caring and gentle, Arturo remembers, he was attentive, with a poetic soul. He spent quite some time in India, Pakistan, and elsewhere searching for spirituality. He was joyful. Heroin, methadone and some psychedelic blotters were laid here and there in the house, they were using it, they were shooting up in the bathroom, getting high, but we could not. ‘You are too young,’ he was always saying.¹ As the story goes, Cookie and Vittorio married in 1986 on a rooftop in the East Village and partied in Joseph Kosuth’s loft. At that moment, they both knew they were living with HIV—but that couldn’t matter when you can shrink a hundred lives in one, as time could be woven from the fleeting instants, untouched by tomorrow: a here and now that is rapturous and ruinous, that rains existence.

I first saw Vittorio’s drawings on an unexpectedly sunny November day in 2017, in Clapham in the South-West of London. At Studio Voltaire, Paul Pieroni curated a retrospective with more than forty pages scribbled by Scarpati, showing them for the first time since 1989—when Cookie organized a show at 56 Bleecker Gallery² and Nan Goldin included a selection in Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing at Artists Space.³ It was my last day in London and I had to run to Heathrow for my outbound flight to Italy. I knew little about the artist, Cookie, about HIV and AIDS, about what it was like walking around in New York in the ‘80s, yet those small pieces of paper, eight by eleven inches, resonated with me. I figured them as images of isolation, a newly found language when his voice couldn’t be of any help.

In the last months of 1988, Vittorio started to suffer from severe AIDS related illnesses, primarily affecting the lungs. He entered Cabrini Medical Center in New York City, where he then spent most of his time until September 1989, when he died at the age of 34. Pneumonia collapsed his lungs and he was attached by tubes to two pneumothorax suction pumps, helping him breathe. Voice was scarce, hands were faster. He composed more than three-hundred sketches, a visual diary of his time on a single bed, looking outside. An almost empty white room became his landscape—the view developed as infinite possibilities. There is a photo by Philip-Lorca diCorcia depicting a bony Vittorio staring at the camera, his eyes glare at you: there is nothing to fear, com’on face it, I’m here.

When I first saw those drawings I held onto their religious imaginary: angels, crosses and crucifixions, suffering as a paved way to sanctification. I saw pain and loneliness, yet a prolific imagination that sparked as a force, imbued with a subtle irony—rendered in a queer language with a limping grammar. I was reminded of Andrea Pazienza, an Italian cartoonist, creative icon of the students’ movement, and a pivotal figure of the social and political life of Italy in the late 1970s. Pazienza depicts the hopes and the dreams of a generation, his sarcasm hints at the void hiding under the surface, his words mark a political commitment which resembles a collective manifesto. Yet his drawings—which Scarpati must have seen when in Italy—ultimately narrow down to himself. Pompeo, published in 1987, follows the main character as he plunges into the depths of heroin: the book (a diary in the form of an autobiography), lays his guts on the table. It is not a story of redemption, but an unflagging search for joy concealed in the lands of despair. It is a radical attempt to envision an alternative that follows a refusal—an isolation that somehow ends up somewhere different, an underground thread that sheds a tear of light. I thought Vittorio’s work was no different.

Yet, as I am looking at them now, I realized I was wrong. Loneliness becomes a tool through which Scarpati can understand time: it is the scale that weighs how time flows, or when it stops. It gives time a body, a physical and emotive thickness as unbearable as it could be, as light and ghostly as it could become. It is a cartographic tool which maps his emotional valleys, the peaks of joy and euphoria, the slopes of despair. Time is recorded and photographed, suspended and stopped in the drawings: even the doctors were incredulous at this man’s strength of will, said Cookie Mueller, they told me that most other patients in similar circumstances would have given up after two months.⁴ Far from being a constraint, time ends up being complicit, resting on his chest as a snail. It is embodied, becoming flesh and fluids throughout his non-working chest: time is pain, whenever Vittorio allows it to be so.

Time is divergent, multiple, slanted, hallucinatory. It is no mystery that Scarpati was familiar with heroin, using methadone as a counterbalance, hence his work can be read bearing in mind S. Clay Wilson’s chaotically detailed strips, Rick Griffin’s rounded and muddy illustrations, or Gilbert Shelton’s slender stretched characters. His drawings refer to the psychedelic tradition—nesting and departing from the LSD art of the 1960s: I was completely out of it because of the drugs; I need to find a way to stop the flow of these rubbery hallucinations that are taking over my twilight states and polluting my moments of clarity.⁵ Yet, it is about joy—Scarpati does not depict the illicitness of depression, he does not paint the room with sadness. Joy delineates the body’s boundaries, it permeates the dolphins’ eyes as they twirl in the sky. In an interview recently found by Visual AIDS, Scarpati—with a low voice, as if it comes from the underground—affirms his preference for dolphins, as they are superior. Their brain is bigger than ours. You know, we got this little hand which they have too. But we have developed this little killing machine.⁶ Dolphins are figures of bliss, pure as they are intangible by agony. In Unfinished film (sequence in memory of Peter Hujar), David Wojnarowicz composes a visual poem where his grief for the loss of Hujar lays in the underwater dance of the beluga whales, their sad innocence bears a secret one could not tell. Liquidity of water becomes, here and there, redemption.

Then, there is the body: broken down, subjected and abject. Vittorio’s body is almost always present, as a placeholder. As a self-portrait, the drawings concentrate on flesh as a mechanical composition, each portion preserves a function besides biology. Lungs, collapsed because of the pneumocystis carinii (one of the infections caused by AIDS), turn into objects of desire: they deserve worship, floating up above the ground surrounded by angels. The skin is porous as it is penetrated—either by tubes as big as a nickel, or by needles—it is vibrant as it changes color.

Scarpati’s work is an epic compelled in the turmoil of a single body. Either his full presence, or just some part of it, signals a reference to the present day—of him, making the work while laying in a hospital bed. All around, a series of background actors—nurses, doctors, fairies, madonnas, elephants (big and heavy as they could be in hallucinations), snails, dolphins, gorillas—form a zoo tied with affection. Cookie Mueller stands out as a relief, she is a badass, an angel and I hope she comes again and again.

I cannot help but think of love. The HIV/AIDS epidemic redefined the place for politics: it is as much in the streets as it animates the intimacy of private homes. It is a politics of love, since affection is given gratuitously, unjustified. It is the network of the self-help groups; the alliances that cross race, gender, sexual preferences; it is the family we choose as opposed to those that don’t recognize our serological status. It is giving without expecting anything back. It is getting rid of self-will, self-justification, self-love which war against spirituality and are the cause of sins, disease and death, as Scarpati writes in one of his works.⁷ Love (affection) appears less as an image of a relationship—of what we might want or become—; rather it is the unruly trajectory of a force that, starting from a body—in this case, one singular body which reiterates across the drawings—unfolds into what we might do. It exists when we look, feel, observe, perceive, imagine and think. It expands into an infinite sea of possible actions, hallucinations, and possibilities. Love is the liberator as long as it dissolves in its infinite manifestations.⁸