Filippo Berta’s intervention culminates in the first two chapters of the triptych A nostra immagine e somiglianza (In our image and likeness), (2017 – ongoing), which investigates the relationship between the individual and the rules imposed by social conventions, by religious dogma. In the first chapter – exhibited as a video documenting a performance realised at Galleria Massimodeluca in Mestre in January 2018 – a number of people simultaneously plant a nail on a wall in order to hang a crucifix: each participant performs the action on tiptoe so that they can place it at a height higher than themselves, in doing so acting out man’s innate need to put himself in a position subordinate to the entity embodied by the idol.

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The theme of failure becomes metaphorical in works such as Perfect Form(2018).

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The theme of failure becomes metaphorical in works such as Allumettes #2 (2013).

The works Remember, Repeat, Rework 6 and 7 (2015) are two photographic diptychs realised by Fogarolliby appropriating and collating archive images.

In Locura (2018), a new work from the project Stone of madness, Folgarolli refers to the beliefs prevalent in Northern Europe in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance (but also present in prehistoric civilizations) that attributed deviant behaviour, like madness or eccentricity, to the presence of a stone in the human skull. The work is composed of an analogue photograph of a brain with a stone nestled within it, a fluorite, whose chromatic tone changes thanks to the intervention of the spectator, who is invited to interact with it using a device that emits ultraviolet light. In this way, Fogarolli presents an iconographic theme that has its most illustrious precedent in Hieronymus Bosch’s paint The Extraction of the Stone of Madness (1494). In this work, the Dutch master depicts a genre scene in which a charlatan deceives a naive person, from whose head he extracts a flower; the painter, however, exaggerates the arrogance of the deceiver, who wears a funnel-shaped hat on his head, symbolising the idiocy of his alleged knowledge.

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In the work Leaven(2017) of Folgarolli, which features a display case containing manuals on the classification of mental illnesses published in the United States between 1952 and 2015, which reveal how, in the last fifty years, a small group of scholars have determined the concept (very changeable and elusive) of “normality” for the entire human race, consequently leading, as the title of the work indicates, to an exponential increase in the types of these disorders.

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Placebo (2018), a Fogarolli’s work, a play on the relationship between natural and artificial that combines a drug capsule with the chrysalis of a dragonfly.In the diptych Just One (2017) of Berta the woollen mantle of a sheep – white, of a uniform beauty – is shorn in a show of praise for imperfection. The short-circuit created by this representation is further accentuated by the fact that the animal is placed on a pedestal, parodically evoking the idea of an equestrian monument, in which, instead of the martial features of Andrea del Verrocchio’s Colleoni or the haughty ones of Donatello’s Gattamelata (the two great Renaissance models), we find those of an animal devoid of any heroism.

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Scientific imagery, dear to Folgarolli, reverberates through other works: from the sculpture Midólla (2017), which analogically transfers an early twentieth century image of a mental patient’s spinal cord onto marble.

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The works Remember, Repeat, Rework (2015) are two photographic diptychs realised by Fogarolli by appropriating and collating archive images. In both these works, a portrait of a young woman in a state of amnesia, admitted to an American hospital in the first half of the twentieth century, is related to a photograph of the ethnographic collection of Amsterdam’s Tropenmuseum, which shows the features of some sculptures discovered in the Dutch colonies in Indonesia. In this unusual, Warburg-style visual dialogue, analogies between dissimilar sources are created, in which the first subject’s state of incapability seems to find a response in the (hypothetical) thaumaturgical capabilities of tribal fetishes.

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The theme of failure becomes metaphorical in works such as Sulla retta via (On the right path) (2014) of Filippo Berta. The latter work presents a group trying to walk in single file, following the transient border between earth and sea defined by the waves. It is a line that is continuously broken up, thus highlighting the impossibility of man finding a balance between primitive emotional-bestial nature and the rationality necessary for being part of society.
Christian Fogarolli, retracing the relationship between art and scientific disciplines, investigates the fine boundary between normality and deviance, as well as the arbitrary character of the relative categorisations. This is particularly evident in the work Misura di prevenzione (Preventative measure) (2017), an installation that resembles a water level, a device that has been used since ancient times, utilising it to depict the concept of chemical imbalance, today considered at the root of many mental disorders.

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The exhibition opens with Christian Fogarolli’s sculpture Loose (2017), which invites the visitor to interact with the work in order to be able to slowly begin to grasp the image-identity that emerges from a play of refractions on a mirrored surface. The archive photographic image appropriated by the artist re-emerges in fragments under the shapeless lead surface and to see it requires patience and expertise, a process that symbolically stages a going beyond first retinal observations of appearances in order to open oneself up to the discovery of the other and its peculiarities – an action that essentially sums up the meaning of the whole of the Persona exhibition. 
In Filippo Berta’s Déjà vu (2008) a seemingly playful game of tug of war between six pairs of twins elicits a reflection on the competitiveness that underlies our existence: a metaphorical return to Bellum omnium contraomnes where you fight people with the same genetic makeup. In the work of Filippo Berta, it is the mise-en-scène of small everyday gestures that bring out the conflict and tension inherent in the relationship between man and society. The series of videos and photographs on display are the result of collective performances in which seemingly banal actions assume an allegorical value in order to unmask the conformism prevalent in our lives.

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Era lì da sempre was born while Lucia Veronesi was staying in Norway. The work, created from rocks and materials deriving from industrial processes, consists of elements gathered during numerous walks, of which they record traces and memories, as a sort of random sampling. In the installation – the title of which has a vaguely existential flavour that maybe refers to the state of abandonment of the materials gathered – the artist places light elements, such as textiles, with more massive sculptural parts, created in rock and plaster. Era lì da sempre thus appears to have been made from heterogeneous forms, from rejects (or the less noble elements) of the landscape and the production cycle, pulped and ripped textiles. Veronesi gives new life to these, giving them new meaning as constituent elements of a new landscape. A landscape that is hypothetical, mental and speculative, but nonetheless fascinating and emotionally pregnant. There coexist in the work, therefore, natural components and anthropomorphic material, organic-type needs and the hidden signs of our industrial world, both part of a complex orography that proceeds by suggestion, by fragments, by parataxis, by the addition of subsequent elements. The work, remounted and remodelled according to the layout of the room in Casa Testori, dialogues with the sections of landscape visible from the window, in a continual cross-reference of material, chromatic and geometric fragments.

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