Room 21

Wunderkammer (Chamber of Wonders) is an expression from the German language, used to refer to particular rooms where, from the 16th to the 18th century, collectors used to keep collections of extraordinary objects. In a way they can be considered as the embryonic stage of contemporary museums. All objects of wonder were closely linked to the idea of private ownership: this stimulated the growth and spread of collecting. The aim of the collector was to get hold of extraordinary objects found in nature (naturalia) or created by man (artificialia). More generally, these objects were called mirabilia, things capable of arousing admiration and amazement.
With this new chapter I wanted to create a room that would contain, and in some way narrate, the wonder and amazement that I feel when I listen to the noises behind my work.
Every gesture I make, every creative process, brings with it a sonic consequence, an unconscious rhythm that comes to influence and inspire my thinking.
This multitude of sounds, a translation of the force applied to the material, composes in my head an infinite series of melodies that I have been obsessively trying to record and document for some time.
Because to fully understand the relationship between a sculptor and his material, it is essential to listen to their soundtrack.
Corrado Abate

Corrado Abate works on wood as if in a dialogue with an alter ego: he listens, observes, assimilates everything the material has to say in order to then intervene and express its intimate essence. For the artist, the act of creating is an almost alchemical and experimental process that uses the principles of chemistry and physics to interpret intrinsic realities. The splits, burns and penetrations are actions inflicted on a material that is still alive, which therefore reacts and metabolises over time, bearing its marks. The violent physical effort of Abate’s intervention on the wood as an entity other than itself reveals itself as a form of self-harm: an attempt to perceive its own existence and to seek a balance. One thus senses an intense and profound bond between the artist and the works: each is the story of a close relationship, an osmosis that imprints a strong energy on the material and conveys the sensation of a connection with the All.
Maddalena Tibertelli de Pisis

Corrado Abate was born in 1977 in Biella, where he lives and works.

Room 20

How is it that a fifty-year-old ‘madman’ starts graffitiing at Casa Testori? Why is he presenting us with a work from the last millennium?
The exhibition here would like to open up to the younger generations, to highlight their work. What does this graffiti suggest to us, which is not really graffiti at all, given that it is a quotation of a graffiti, moreover “cinematographic”, and therefore fictitious in origin… A quotation of a quotation therefore… And yet in every passage indexed… F.F. Coppola quotes with that graffiti, the character’s sign, the being against par excellence, and in the film he decrees its end, or crisis, and as its only existential development he posits a poetic act, destined to result in death. Beyond F.F. Coppola’s tragic vision, The Motorcycle Boy is an insane, anarchic figure, and thanks to his impossibility of adaptation, due to his “sensitivity”, the only one still capable of communicating us a truth, beyond any mediation.
From these observations, 15 years ago the desire to quote him was born, and now in this context, aimed precisely at the new generation and in the deep darkness of the new era, I hope it can say what it is and what I hope art always wants to be, and that is to say invention for a possible world, perhaps better than this one, where, as in the Motorcycle Boy’s dream, the fighting fish in the ocean can live in peace, because they each have enough space for their own needs.
Mario Airò

Each of his [Airò’s] works discreetly affirms that there is a possibility of seeing the world with new eyes, of living one’s own experience by cultivating an expectation of the world.
Gianni Romano

Mario Airò was born in Pavia in 1961. He lives and works in Genoa.

Room 19

What kind of feeling do I have when I find myself in a Gothic cathedral where everything points to verticality?
In sacred buildings there is often a recognisable relationship between botanical structures, rules of construction that work on both a large and small scale.
The material realisation speaks to me of spiritual intentions, and in the case of churches and temples it speaks to me of the faith of those who built them. Something similar can be seen in works of art.
Christiane Löhr

Simplicity and the essence of things.Light and fragile, Christiane Löhr’s work resolves the complexity and abundance of the elements of which it is composed with “delicacy”. The great constructive laboriousness, the number of micro-elements used, the geometric and compositional richness of the forms, find expression in a surprising and precious simplicity, which manifests itself through delicacy, fragility and lightness. The essence of Christiane Löhr’s work can be grasped by observing, down to the most microscopic detail, the complexity that generates it, and of which she succeeds in achieving an aesthetic synthesis admirable in beauty and yet incredibly light, almost evanescent, in perception. The expressive power of these works lies precisely in their capacity to surprise, to leave us breathless, in a form of obsequious enchantment and respect for the impalpable fragility of which they are made up.
Thistle seeds, dandelions, grass stalks and horsehair are the elements used to compose veritable micro-architectures, sustained by rigour and geometric precision, where nothing is superfluous and everything is subject to rules that seem to draw directly from Nature, even if Nature is merely a starting point from which to build unexpected compositions somewhere between the botanical and the architectural. […]
Christiane Löhr captures Nature’s ephemeral sense and the transience of its elements, challenging its physical laws by assembling seeds into unusual shapes, and its temporal laws by fixing those same elements in immobile and lasting structures. […] At this point, the search becomes evident: simplicity becomes the instrument of investigation to identify something that lies far beyond appearance, that uses fragility to make the ear and the senses subtend a latent message, barely whispered, of the search for the essence of things, of an intrinsic Nature that hides behind the complex and articulated form, that orders beauty and regulates the world.
“Perhaps I am searching for what holds the world together” says the artist: delicacy is a condition, a state of feeling, and simplicity a goal, which is achieved, as Constantin Brancusi taught, “in spite of oneself, by getting closer to the real meaning of things”.
Valentina Muscedra

Christiane Löhr was born in Wiesbaden (Germany) in 1965. She lives and works between Cologne and Prato.

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.

Room 17

In order not to miss the target when crossing the river, one calculates the distance and the current, arriving at the expected point (Leonardo da Vinci).
Or you start off by letting the current deviate and you land who knows where (Huckleberry Finn). I like Huck better.
Studying, thanks to a Slovenian mathematician, Japanese prints from the “Edo” period (capital of the East under the Tukugawa Shoguns 1603-1867, now Tokyo), and fresh from my experience as an engraver, I set off towards the unknown by painting, drawing, often washing canvas or paper. Freeing the precious bodies from the splendid kimono-armour (so similar to the crinoline of poor Infanta Margherita), transforming it into colour, ornament… Ukiyo-e (image of the floating world). Bushi (warriors) also from the theatre, geishas also male, housewives, children, dogs and cats appear.
Time flows but is delayed. Memento mori!
Klaus Karl Mehrkens

If I write reason and heart, it is because Mehrkens has built his painting on these very cornerstones, on these two pillars of human existence. And this from the very beginning. When it was much more difficult for him, and for everyone else, to leave the fires and cries of expressiveness unbridled, or very unbridled, in favour of a need, which in Mehrkens was immediately extreme and total; the need to construct expression; to make it architecture, light and blessing, instead of sneer, fire and curse.
Giovanni Testori

Klaus Mehrkens was born in Bremen (Germany) in 1955. He lives and works in Spello (PG).

Room 16

I do these paintings because I feel them inside. One might wonder why I choose to represent landscapes, portraits or houses isolated in a landscape. The house has the meaning of a person. I only know the outside but not the inside. Like a family. I am on the outside, I can never get inside.
The animals are the ferocity, the savage, the representation of my life.
Colour is energy, sensation. Dimension that I transform into my reality. Red, yellow, blue, very strong colours. Expressionist. In my soul I feel a bit Nordic, I love Kirchner and Nolde, with his childish paintings, but full of emotion!
Davide Baroggi

…What is happening in these images, or what has ‘already’ happened? Is there a present or only a suspension between waiting and abandonment? Is there a before of creation or its irreversible agony? Exposed on the precipice of nothingness and yet capable of manifesting themselves with the invention, even absurd, of colour, with the soaring of the sign, the convulsive precipitation of narrative times, these paintings live on the anxiety that has generated them and, even in their convulsive instance, they still question us on the reasons for living.
Claudio Olivieri

Davide Baroggi was born in 1974 in Locarno (Switzerland). He lives and works in Pavia.

Room 15

My paternal grandmother was a seamstress, the most famous seamstress in the neighbourhood, she was the one who sewed all those little skirts for the vain little girls I used to show off at school, she made them from scraps of many types of fabric, and so polka dots were mixed with little flowers, stripes with little squares; if I think about it I was unconsciously punk, alternative, today they would be vintage and would sell like hot cakes, at the time they were just cheerful and colourful, except for one time when for Christmas she had some black velvet left over and sewed me an outfit with a matching waistcoat. I was crazy about that Zac Zac Zac noise of big scissors, it sounded like a clapperboard at the end of a take and it was her daily film, a plot that filled present and absent spaces. ZAC
Michela Forte

To enter Michela Forte’s world, you need a key… And you have to enter slowly, silently, with a slight bow of the head.
Intimacy and depth of a feminine and sacred world, the works chosen for this exhibition tell of her fragility and extraordinary strength. It is difficult to separate the images from the artist in this case.
Intense blacks and whites that refer to the sublime power of life, to the roots of a past that helps us live in the present. I have always loved the deep drama of these images which have a sense of grace. Truth and beauty in a quick, fast and deep shot. Black and white photograms that tell of life, roots, emotions, memories, purity, beauty, pain, strength, tragedy, intimacy, passion, music.
Scissors that cut to sew and scissors that cut to save. The painful, tragic and saving power of love. The thread that saves the heart in the operation room becomes a crown of passion so alive and real. The pomegranate, sacred and royal fruit, placed next to her body, unites sanctity and beauty, fertility and the abundance of life.
Everyday objects that are transfigured into a profound meaning, to the point of making the everyday sacred, monumental, timeless.And always, even just a detail, reminds us of her presence, because she puts herself on the line and reminds us that those are her eyes, which portray, remember and love.
Alessandra Klimciuk

Michela Forte was born in 1980 in Erice (TP). She lives and works in Milan.

Garden

Critic John Berger says: “When they are intent on examining a man, the eyes of an animal are alert and wary. That same animal may well look at another species in the same way. It does not reserve a special gaze for man. But no other species, except man, will recognise the animal’s gaze as familiar. Other animals are kept at a distance from that gaze. Man becomes self-conscious in returning it. The animal peers at him through a narrow gulf of non-understanding. That is why man can surprise the animal. Yet even the animal – even if it is domestic – can surprise man.”
But how? By feeling an indefinite nostalgia for a ferinity that was and is no more, for a call to nature that is not entirely dormant under thick layers of civilisation. Here is where man does his best to segregate domestic animals, to build and visit zoos, in the useless search for that gaze, for the eye of the animal which, however, completely distorted, does not stop except for an instant to observe the visitor, and then blindly heads beyond, beyond, because nothing can occupy a central place in his attention any more.
I am trying to re-propose that dualism which was completely lost when man felt he was the lord and master of nature. The dualism of the gaze between the man-species and the eyes of other living beings: my work wants to propose the surprising encounter, fruitful because it is subtracted by artistic elaboration from the anaesthetisation of the present, the encounter between man and animal.
Davide Rivalta

The artist’s aim, then, is to fix the possibility of a real encounter between three different elements: the figure of the animal in the form of a sculpture which, even if it is made by art, maintains its own characteristic innocent sacredness, its own naturalness, and, while not being able to completely escape the always possible symbolic associations, distances itself from them by virtue of its own “realism” of workmanship; the environmental context in which it finds itself to be and on which it tends neither to prevaricate nor to direct, but only to be there as an ungrateful guest; and finally all those who will find themselves by choice, by habit or by chance, to confront it. In this way a play of relationships is established that is the true and ultimate substance of the work, more so than its stylistic and formal features. This substance consists in the evocation of a positive sense of life in its most elementary manifestations, such as those offered by the randomness of existence and by the perceptive potentialities that connect us with the world and with the other-than-self within that shared, and not exclusive, space from which no living form can ultimately escape. Everything then tends towards wonder, which is equal in the represented and the observer, seen and sighted, as if to indicate that primordial unity that is our lost paradise.
Pier Luigi Tazzi

Davide Rivalta was born in 1974 in Bologna, where he lives and works.

Room 14

At the beginning I wanted to create a small sculpture that would contain its own story, but as time went by the story expanded.
Gradually I was composing a narrative, a preordained path, about today’s society.
This is how Ultima Cena was born, a sculptural-pictorial installation, a story in images aimed at breaking through the veil of Maya.
I chose this title as a pretext to mark a passage.
A beginning.
An end.
Francesco Diluca

The sense of absence.
Francesco Diluca sees in these twisted forms, in these human plates, a possibility of union of the individual with the universal, the particular and the general, the sense of the intelligible joined to the extrinsicity of the sensitive world.
But then where is the body? Can the container exist without the content? What strange metamorphosis is happening to these men and why? It is precisely on these questions, these doubts, that Diluca concentrates, trying to subvert every possible expectation, depicting an envelope, a cocoon apparently lifeless, static and defenceless, the soul of non-presence, to induce us to consider and try to understand the meaning of absence. An absence that obligatorily invites, or rather forces, us to evaluate and analyse the reason for this lack, thus paradoxically finding its own unity among the plots of the sensitive, of the material, to then find meaning in the immaterial.
It is now a question of continuing the journey inside the chrysalis, in the bowels of the body, between the wefts of the soul and the lucubrations of thought; sculptures that find the courage to break, to then penetrate into the interior and the structuring of the human framework.
The work of art, as Andrè Malraux reminds us, is not only execution, but birth, it is life in the face of life.
Alberto Mattia Martini

Francesco Diluca was born in 1979 in Milano, where he lives and works.

Room 13

In my works I focus on the affective dimension that lies in empathy, so as to respond with an appropriate emotionality to the thoughts and feelings of another person.
Rouffach is a video installation commissioned by the Centre Hospitalier de Rouffach, a mental hospital in Alsace, France. The commission made it possible for me to experience the encounter with other human beings through the use of the camera.
My starting point was Martin Schongauer’s 15th century altar of Our Lady of the Roses. I worked with seven patients because the prayer to the Virgin Mary is based on seven sorrows and seven joys. A simple binary structure emerged from this work – ask each person what their best and worst moments were.
Each patient was filmed frontally in the study, while answering these two questions, and then also filmed in different places geographically connected with the hospital – on the hospital floor, on the streets of the nearby town of Rouffach, in the vineyards surrounding the hospital, in the cloister of Colmar, in the forests around, near a lake, and on the top of the nearest mountain. The person is always moving away from the viewer, as if crossing the frame. The images of these people talking, listening and walking in space are juxtaposed in a triple projection channel.
Leonora Hamill

There is the opening up of a “new” dialectic within each character, who in recalling their own experiences to themselves, even before the spectator, generates a sort of short-circuit between what is said and what is unspeakable.
The result is an exchange of roles in which the patient, who is used to being assisted, takes the place of the healer (medical staff) for once, and the spectator becomes an accomplice in this mechanism. It is he who leads us into the meanders of the joy/pain experience, he who opens the doors of the empathic and psychic sphere.
“I won’t be able to see these patients with the same eyes as before…” was the comment of a nurse who had only just realised the inversion between the parties.Our perception almost stops in front of the dimension of the unspeakable and imposes deep reflections on the limit imposed on us by the words we have never had the courage to pronounce, and on the right to be heard, what in Rouffach’s reality is simply called le droit d’ècouter.
Edoardo Testori

Leonora Hamill was born in Parigi in 1978. She lives between Milan and London.