Pietas arises from a desire to rewrite the myth of Medea, as told by Euripides, in a more real form, in which the events lose the aura and rigidity imposed by the myth, becoming humanized and updated to our own times. In Elisabetta Di Sopra’s work, Medea is no longer the mother who taints herself with the crime of the children to whom she gave birth from her own womb, but is the victim of the violence of our own times. Disoriented and stupefied by grief, she weeps for the children whose destiny she does not know, and of whom she desperately seeks a trace, some minimal sign that might indicate they are still alive. On a desolate beach (from which we see, anachronistically, the presence of large ships furrowing the sea), Medea, now old and no longer lucid, digs and takes to herself a scarf, a tee-shirt, some trousers, thrown up by the sea, emblems of an absence that cannot be restored. Her figure conserves echoes of Pasolini in her clothing, in her movements and in her restrained, almost hieratic desperation, for which it seems there can be no peace. Pietas is a reflection on the drama of contemporary immigration, on mothers who do not know the fate of their children and on the negated hopes of a better future, against which have dashed so many lives that must cross seas, climb walls, scale mountains or frontiers. The aged mother is thus doubly punished by destiny, with her grief and a bitter, infinite solitude.

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Camille is the artist’s homage to Claude Monet’s first wife, Camille Doncieux, who died at the early age of thirty-two in 1879. Michela Pomaro imagines that, in the intimacy of that brief relationship, Camille would have been the first witness to the cosmic pulverization of colour that was to mark Monet’s long and extraordinary career. Starting from this intuition, she imagined the work specifically created for this exhibition. Inside six parallelepipeds in Plexiglas, planned with extremely rigorous lines, almost like design objects, she has placed LED lights, each required to create a different visual effect. The boxes comprising the installation have been harmonized with each other, giving rise to a continually mutating chromatic concert. The colour is generated by an inaccessible source and flows into the space, redesigning it. As in much contemporary work, Michela Pomaro breaks free of the specific confines of painting, launching itself into a dimension that nevertheless remains strongly pictorial. Another factor, too, comes into play in the artist’s work – the dialogue between the formal certainty of the containers and the alchemistic, unfathomable and mysterious process taking place inside. The rational solidity of the boxes, which makes conceptual reference to the rectangularity of the canvas, makes more acute, by contrast, the transitory and mutable dimension of the colour.

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Lalla Lussu’s artistic quest aims to investigate the potential of paint to generate the unexpected, to determine rhythms, forms, geometrical shapes, structures and spaces that did not previously exist. The artist’s practice, procedural by nature, is based on free application of paint directly onto the supports, generally fabrics in jute or rough linen. These are then processed, pleated at uniform distances to render them agitated, cadenced and three-dimensional. This sculptural manner, contrary to the usual two-dimensionality of the pictorial image, is further strengthened by the installation of the work, not on a wall, but freely in the middle of the room, starting from the ceiling. Lussu thus overturns the logic of the work as a contemplative stasis to be observed frontally, and sets in motion interactive potentials. The spectators, in fact, have to move in a zigzag manner around the elements, as if walking in a wood, touching the surfaces with their bodies or delicately setting the fabric aside with their hands. Her forest is an imaginary one, inhabited by coloured trees, of which the surface, the roughness, the ripples and the perfumed bark are magically suggested by the canvas. The observers are invited to grasp the details by walking in the middle of it, moving freely like explorers venturing among the trees and losing themselves among the vivid colours of the tropical forest.

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For Maria Morganti, her website is a work of art. “I imagined this site as an integral part of my work, as a support for my obsessive habit of accumulating, withholding, recording and exhibiting. Since it is a lucubration, it will transform continually and will keep open a constantly mutating research”, we read on the home page. In the display designed for Casa Testori, the centre has been assigned to the computer, placed on the table that was once Giovanni Testori’s desk. It is open at the site to allow visitors to navigate it. The small panel Melma, a work resulting from dripping paint brushes, has been placed in the open drawer. Melma is also, however, the background of the home page of the site, confirming this symbiotic identity between Morganti’s artistic activity at a real level and its expansion into virtual terrain. On the lateral walls, on the other hand, Morganti has wished to exhibit two large summarizing screen displays, one representing the navigation tree of the site, the other a complete compilation of all the files that populate it. The printouts constitute the works Autoritratti 2019 and Archivio 2019, which effectively represents a glance at the artist herself. Two self-portraits that complete each other and cross-fertilize one another. The specifically catalogizing nature of the site, expressed by the self-portrait that presents the dense list of files, is destabilized by the tree which gives the idea, instead, of an organism in constant movement and mutation. Thus the site becomes, for the artist, a place in which to look at herself and also in which to let herself be looked at, by the navigators, but also by those hosted therein.

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Silvia Giambrone’s work is of a frankly political nature. It highlights and denounces the way in which females are demeaned through cultural models involving their bodies, through the conduct expected of them and by manipulation of their images. In particular, Il danno shows a standard female bodyin babydoll – typically viewed in a condition offering pleasure, erotic charge and seduction for men. It has nevertheless been deformed by an extraneous geometric element, placed at the groin, and by an extrusion at the abdomen, just above the navel. These presences bring to mind, respectively, sanitary pads and prostheses applied to the breasts to make them more voluminous. They compel the observer to see the body of that woman, who is without a face, and so has no identity of her own, as something extraneous to the logic of desire. Ironically, it appears as damage compared with stereotyped expectations. It shows how a small detail can determine a person’s life, conditioning their form, thoughts, time and freedom, while deviation is perceived today as limiting and crippling with respect to the logic of dominion. The photos of Baby dull document a performance created by the artist in a motel where she installed false metal eyebrows, fixing them to the wall with chains. The work, permanently installed a room of the motel, is an invitation to an intimate play of changing perspectives, gender and identity.

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For Linda Carrara, the surface is the place where the pictorial event has its genesis. The surface is the subject, marble or rock, as in the two works chosen for the exhibition. The surface is also that of the paper or canvas, which assume their visual identity through a process of mimesis. It is an experience founded on illustrious precedents. In her False Carrara marble series, for example, the artist takes her cue from an ancient tradition, that of Giotto’s or Beato Angelico’s false marbles in apparently peripheral areas of their fresco cycles. The marbles have often been seen as elements with a purely decorative value, but in reality their neutrality hides secrets and powerful references. The great composite work displayed on the rear wall of the room is an exercise in mimesis set up by the artist. An exercise that lends life and evocative energy to the pictorial surface by its simple visual resemblance to another surface, that of Carrara marble. In the composition, solemn in its appearance as a great polyptych, our perceptions are led astray. The stone, with its veins, seems to become a sky furrowed by the wind, almost a great new window opened onto space. But the surface is also at the centre of another of Carrara’s recent works: these are “frottage” pieces created by placing the canvases on the rocks by the banks of the Adda. These are the rocks that Leonardo would have looked at for his Milanese Vergini delle rocce paintings. In this case, too, the intense red used for the “frottage” suggests a hypothesis of mutations: the mineral element evokes, in mysterious form, a carnal event.

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The sign is at the centre of Marta Spagnoli’s research. It is a sign that does not spring from predetermined hypotheses and is freed of any need to have a meaning. The sign is the primogenial entity, which first and foremost gives life to the painting on the surface for which it is intended. It is by no chance that, as in the large-scale work presented at Casa Testori, the sign assumes the filamentous aspect of a natural organism actively inhabiting the canvas, like continuously mutating writing. The sign, for Marta Spagnoli, effectively acquires pictorial value in the

moment in which it is free from intentionality and emotiveness, accepting its reduction to a trace, a clue, the simple result of an act that may sometimes simply coincide with the action of the brush. It is a condition where there are

neither hierarchies nor sequences that can restore a logic to these signs. Painting thus becomes an open field in which is enacted a re-immersion of forms, always poised between the archaic and the present, between the physical and the mythical dimensions. The sign, however empty of content it may be, never relapses into abstraction. The surface, as can be seen clearly in Untitled, thus becomes a place of great pictorial intensity, a field in which multiple and elementary energies gather. The canvas therefore becomes a space inhabited by these sequences, which are not simple translations of the real into writing, but pregnant particles from which to await new and ongoing processes of meaning.

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Non qui and Nebbia are two works created by Nazzarena Poli Maramotti during a residence for artists at Dale i Sunnfjord, Norway in 2019. Her painting has been very much influenced by this place. The interminable days followed by the brief, light Scandinavian nights inspire – and almost impose – a constant vision of majestic and pervasive nature, obsessively constellated by lakes, fjords, waterfalls and rain. The artist has a long acquaintance with northern lights, having lived in Nuremburg for many years, and this familiarity has probably freed her painting from the need for precise formal definition. The result is that characteristically fluid, atmospheric nature we recognize in the two works, of very different dimensions, exhibited at Casa Testori. In Non qui, we witness something like a struggle between the damp omnipresence pervading the canvas and the Tiepolo-like sky blue that forces its presence and finally breaks through with great intensity. This struggle, in truth, becomes for Poli Maramotti an excuse to make the pictorial field the real subject of her painting. Here she can exercise the full potential of painting itself, in a series of contrasts and continual stylistic fractures. In Nebbia, the gentler paintwork, almost like a homogenous and muffled light, gives way in the upper part to a thin band of tormented painting – like a tiny drama within the pictorial event, strongly negating any possible naturalistic interpretation of the work.

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In the work of Serena Vestrucci, daily existence often provides the raw material for her artistic experience. Raw material in the most concrete sense of the term: if, in the cycle Trucchi [Make ups], her canvases were painted with eye-shadows, robbing her technique from daily life, in these new works presented at the exhibition, it is her bed sheet that takes the place of the canvas. As she herself has explained, “every night I tie a biro to a different part of my body and let it trace freely the marks of my movements, uncontrolled and unconditioned by my active mind”. The subject of these two works, therefore, is what the artist’s body does during her sleep. The result is light traces, indecipherable in their development, which relate very delicately and chastely the substrata of her conscience. These markings are like seismographs of an involuntary artistic action. And the involuntary nature, rigorously respected by the artist during the process, becomes an aesthetic factor, due to the overall gracefulness governing the combination of the markings and the support. In a recent pamphlet, Giorgio Agamben, commenting Artemisia Gentileschi’s Allegoria della pittura, recalled that sleep, for Aristoteles, was “the possession of consciousness in power”, while the state of waking coincides with “consciousness in action”. This power, Agamben explains, is not “the generalized power that can become this, that or anything in a child”, but that “proper to those who have acquired the corresponding art and knowledge”. We can therefore imagine that, with La dimensione del sonno, Serena Vestrucci left free and infinite space to her state of “power”.

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Giorgia Severi’s research is directed towards the environment and the way in which it interacts geologically, biologically, culturally and emotively with man. In particular, her work investigates the precarious and fragile condition of the landscape as well as the ongoing sudden changes caused by the devastating anthropic presence, which has reshaped every corner of the earth to conform to its own needs. About the creation (Rocca Pendice, parete Messner) is a “frottage” of a mountain face made with charcoal directly on a tapestry surface in the Euganean Hills, an area especially exposed to phenomena of erosion caused by climate change. The work is an imprint of a small area of the mountain, a cast that silently evokes its presence, unmeasurable age and gigantic extension, which seem enormous compared with the presence of a single man witnessing them as an observer. But it is also a technical device that measures bidimensionally a transitory state of the landscape, a precarious and fleeting form that is destined to change, alter, erode or dissolve – exactly as a photographic image testifies to a past moment that can never come again with the same features. The tapestry therefore proves a sampling of a precise moment that not only conserves a hint of how things were, but metaphorically shows what it is that we want to protect from advancing time and the havoc wrought by man.

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