Guido Nosari, HORNY HOTEL

Room 18

Horny Hotel is the title of a porn film, Etat et Santè the title of a socio-medical study that, though misunderstood, inspired much of the Nazi eugenics policy.
After the experience of the twentieth century we associate the deprivation of freedom and thought with the aesthetics of the extermination camp. Emptiness, extreme thinness, absent colours and passivity inevitably come to mind. But today we should rethink the aesthetics of human annihilation, because it has become one of the characteristics of the contemporary, no longer linked to the idea of an empty camp.
At the opposite pole of emptiness we see the condensation of symbols, bodies, colours, references and stimuli. Like emptiness, excessive presence prevents thought. A place where references fill every space is a field where a coordinated power can exert control over the user.
In the two spaces I used, I tried to take the themes that best fit this establishment of power (particularly sexuality) and tie them to a saturated aesthetic; in the bathroom space, then, I reworked a historical photo of the Testori family taken in the garden (Testori masturbazione 1), making the garden a dense and exciting space, and all that remains of the Testori is a hint of sexuality, which I think this bathroom has really witnessed over time.
Guido Nosari

The accumulation of dense lumps of colour with which he constructs his forms, or rather plastically de-constructs them, has an animal, atavistic quality. Most of the time, starting from photographs, the artist “ruins” the image, once, then again, and then again, with the doggedness of someone who revolts, reshuffles reality and pictorial matter, looking for the dramatic (in the sense of action, theatrical representation) and epic in it.
An accumulation, therefore, that is a journey in depth, an inside that explodes outside. All the superabundance and disorder that is the “inner” world of the “represented” (and of each one of us), which sticks and kneads to the “visible” part.
Here then are the bodies offered naked and stripped bare, the blood red (life and death) hitting the eyes.
All the opposite of therapeutic obstinacy, saying: “die, but tell me who/what you are”. How can we not think of the bloody animals of Varlain, Soutine or even the Giancarlo of the Testori exhibition in Lecco? Or the heap, the cry, the caricatured figures of Grosz?
So red, and from this the pinks, and then the blues. Colours, moreover, of the staging in the portraits of Fra’ Galgario, a native of Bergamo like Nosari, of his sumptuous costumes that seem to contrast with the instead “commonly human” faces (and Nosari writes about this in the 2011 exhibition in Bergamo). A counter-altar, as in another measure at Casa Testori.
Here, the density of the material also has its counter-altar in the small size of the paintings, almost a continuous, “intimate” narration. Moreover, some of the original photographs of the paintings portray the artist and his brother.
The only exception is the large canvas set up in the bathroom, deliberately out of proportion in the space. Painted on a sheet used by Nosari, taken from the only photograph of the entire Testori family (another “intimate” photo engraved on the walls of the villa by Andrea Mastrovito), the work is totally covered by a vegetal germination, by an elegant unfolded peacock’s tail. Accumulating and digging to connect and unveil…
Francesca Radaelli

Guido Nosari was born in 1984 in Bergamo, where he lives and works.