Room 12

My room is a place of passage and an uncomfortable vantage point from which to observe me. Yet I am ready to wait every time I enter it, temporarily and not to be present. Waiting for new images to take shape. The effort is extreme and collected in itself. Forgetting to exist in absence. And then I go out, the picture remains, the figurative image of what I am when I remember everything. Life. My sincere and naked story at the same time appears.
Piero 1/2Botta

More spontaneously than by quotation, I believe that Piero 1/2Botta’s paintings seem to allusively rediscover the carnal intimacy that Philip Guston’s first manner and Willem de Kooning’s entire oeuvre expressed by breaking down and recomposing bodily and material masses. However, Piero 1/2Botta’s declared gestures and sensuality have pre – or extra – pictorial references, and obviously others than what the two masters of the New York School pursued half a century ago. They are autobiographical and bathe in the climate born, not only in Italy, with the painting of the Transavanguardia. But as would be those narrated by a Kafkaesque insect: contiguous, complicit, contaminated, by interstitialities that appear when the vision travels in a radial pattern through the density and meanders of flesh, whether attributable to the human body, to oneself, to others, or to animal presences. Despite an explicit empathy with colour and the interesting way of composing the coloured zoo-anthropomorphic masses by resorting to a repressed form of dripping that condenses and discounts at the same time this portraiture of anonymity, the young Piero 1/2Botta follows a very coherent path in the sense that his personal imprint is already a stylistic recurrence.Remo Guidieri

Piero 1/2Botta was born in Fermo in 1977. He lives and works in Milan.

Room 11

I have been making Beckett portraits for over 10 years. Beckett together with Cèline and Giacometti is for me (and for many) one of the most interesting faces of the 20th century, where art, literature and poetry meet in an inscrutable and elusive synthesis. The image of the Irish playwright becomes more and more of an archetype, it becomes distant, dematerialised, and accentuates its elusiveness. This is why I chose a rigid material such as iron, which, although led by a skilful and synthetic design, tries to capture and fix the image, almost to imprison it within a mental grid, and then hand it down to us as an existential icon.
Mario Francesconi

You have managed to escape the superficial judgement of chronology and even more so the questions of style.
If you like, I will also tell you why: because you are a savage, you are the wildest artist I have ever met.
And I take offence when I see and hear about your work in an iconographic sense, my blood boils when I read useless quotations.Your art is “gesture”.
It is your gesture that leaves one breathless. It is the relationship between the gesture and the idea that are born together with you and in you, but that have an incestuous relationship with each other: they are father and daughter and one does not know where the other is going. They chase each other, they wait for tiny fractions of time, but you can never tell which of the two will prevail. In your gesture until the last moment you don’t know where you are going and the result is as unpredictable as it is surprising.
That’s why your pictures are punches in the stomach or clutches at the heart: they are announcements one doesn’t want to hear, they are “vanitas”, they are the farewell one would never want to hear from a loved one.
Edoardo Testori

Mario Francesconi was born in 1934 in Viareggio (LU), where he lives and works.

Room 10

I’ve just thrown dozens of drawings, notes and a few projects into the rubbish bin which I probably would have kept and turned into work if I had been careful, but I need to see some new space and I’ve got rid of them.
Now my studio is completely empty and I feel at home.
The space of the painting is again clear and I can decide to cross the threshold, but not immediately; for a few moments I still savour the opportunity to have empty space.
No weight or encumbrance shows itself to my gaze, I feel good. I see!
Now new images are appearing and this causes me excitement.
I have a hard time holding back, but I must resist, I must stay calm: careless gestures in this moment of weightlessness can compromise everything.
The private magic of this void lasts a few moments, moments in which no signal is active, just me and this luminous space around me. I remain motionless as long as possible, but standing still is not easy, and soon after, I start to move and end up inside it. I leave.
On my return I discover with amazement that new projects and new images have appeared in the studio, what do I do? Do I wait?
No. I leave and try to sleep, but I wake up early, return to the studio and discover that the bin opposite is empty again… I can’t resist, I feel the urgent need to throw everything away. I do it. I see the beloved space again.
I start again.
Massimo Uberti

Massimo Uberti is an artist of light, who intervenes in space, transforming it into a magical game of constructions and allusions, shapes and ideas. For more than a decade he has been using white neon tubes to compose metaphysical images and design virtual environments, suspended in the poetic and revealing time of the art (of lighting). Simple light profiles bring us closer to the intellectual practice of language (Scrittoio, 2000) or introduce us to the image of the most familiar place (Avvolgente casa, 2009). More articulated and complex light installations project us into the spatial illusion of the unlimited (Senza fine, 2006) and into the temporal aspiration of the endless (Tendente infinito, 2008). Neon signs announce the textual assumption (in art) of a dimension that is both physical and mental, concrete and ideal (Spazio amato, 2008; Altro spazio, 2010).
The latest creation, conceived for Casa Testori, combines in the emptiness of a room structural elements usually used as supports, superimposed on each other, with horizontal luminous segments of increasing size, fixed at regular intervals and intersecting with the former: a progressive and expansive work, which rises from the material to the ethereal, from the real to the apparent, from the corporeal to the affective (Giorni felici, 2011).Stefano Pezzato

Massimo Uberti was born in 1966 in Brescia, where he lives and works.

Room 9

All references to real events, real people and/or real things are purely coincidental.
Danielle Sassoon

“Rooms” in the room. “Rooms” of a past impregnated with fear and pain in a room invaded instead by the happy light of the Lombardy garden. Strips of suffering that take courage, that come out of the black hole in which they were holed up. It is the knot of the past that resurfaces as if out of necessity, taken by the hand of an unexpected destiny that is no longer an enemy. The mute pain of those rooms experienced by a wounded childhood takes on a voice. Visible pain, no longer an enemy, like a rediscovered companion on the road. One almost feels a desire to caress that pain, to finally take care of it. To repeat and repeat that it had and has a meaning.
Like so much female art in recent decades, Danielle Sassoon’s art is fiercely honest with itself. It makes no concessions. It lays the soul bare with rawness. But this does not prevent her from singing. In the room, the “rooms” finally sing their heartbroken song.

Danielle Sassoon was born in 1965 in Milano, where she lives and works.

Room 8

Everything, after all, has its centre, which must be revealed. We have our centre, but we don’t reveal it, we keep it well hidden. Mine is the essence of things, that is to penetrate inside reality and try to unveil these hidden secrets. I am the scientist who betrays science. That is to say, first I take possession of all those means that I now fortunately have at my disposal and then I betray it because instead of using it to make consumer objects, practical objects, I use all my knowledge to direct these results, these inventions to obtain an aesthetic fact.
Piero Fogliati

And while he laboriously worked at a petrol pump, in the cold winters of an already large industrial city, he worked out at night his projects made of immateriality, of lightness, his hope of giving the world back its liveability in the wake of Constant, Klein and even Calvino, thinking of his utopian “Ideal City”, with its Temple of Light, its river, whose waters would resonate with new rhythms, the raindrops would take on colour, the winds would create impalpable and invisible sculptures but perceptible to our senses, noises would be transformed into sounds…
Lara-Vinca Masini

Piero Fogliati was born in Canelli (AT) in 1930. He lives and works in Turin.

Room 7

The images presented are part of a larger project whose protagonists are the tree and the horizon.
The first, in its verticality, is proposed as a spiritual bridge between heaven and earth.
The latter is investigated as a vibrant point of contact between an upward movement towards the sky – which in my work is not a secondary space – and a downward one, towards the earth observed in its primordial matter.
The gaze, crossing the horizon, on the one hand retracts towards some region of myself, on the other it sweeps towards a high and intangible imaginary, the beyond-horizon.
The horizon, as a boundary space and located in the middle of each image, is thus presented as the median and structural line of the four movements.
Along the boundary line rises the mountain. Its base coincides with the earth, with what is material and manifest, but its altitude consecrates it to all that is high and rises towards a superior space.
The photographs presented are the result of the recomposition of several shots, of 9, 12, 15, 16, 20 or 25 images. This solution was dictated by a stylistic challenge, namely to offer a landscape as close as possible to the architecture of the image that only the large 20 x 25 format can render.
Agostino Osio

I would not say Horizons, but Encounters.
Encounters are fundamental to life: crossroads that are turning points or continuations of paths already taken.
The meeting of earth and sky is always there, at a point, on a static line.
Sometimes it is the earth that soars, sometimes it is the sky that descends, low.The point of contact is highly immobile, timeless.
Attilio Maranzano

Agostino Osio was born in 1978 in Milano, where he lives and works.

Room 6

The coffee pot, among other vessels, or domestic appliances, lends itself particularly well to various transpositions, and analogies with buildings and forms of architecture. Particularly with domes, bell towers, minarets and is almost never separated from a certain oriental or more particularly Turkish air or style in the 18th century sense. There is no doubt about it, but its presence in compositions of interiors or still lifes gives a solidity to the image that brings the composition closer to the landscape and particularly to the urban landscape where towers, domes and various buildings predominate.
Aldo Rossi

Rossi was a little wary of industry in general, but he liked Alessi and embarked on lengthy studies of coffee objects, which over time became something of an obsession: notes, sketches, photographs, drawings, projects of various kinds, for Rossi the coffee pot is par excellence the symbol of the dialectical relationship between architecture (or rather town planning) and the “domestic landscape” into which this miniature monument fits. This research gave rise to La conica, La cupola, Ottagono and other objects linked to the coffee ritual.
Alberto Alessi

Aldo Rossi was born and lived in Milan from 1931 to 1997.

Room 5

The works chosen for this exhibition are photos and have to do with the window and the landscape.
When the words land, the moment the words come to us, they come in and speak to us, then they speak through us. The words arrive on earth and we pick them up through our senses: hearing, sight… Like the rain that arranges its own order of drops on the window pane and the sun that filters through the shutter and draws patches of light on the kitchen cupboard.
Marks. The book consists of 60 images: photos of birds in flight taken between 2005 and 2009, whose sky colour has been removed and replaced by the paper of the page. This work is a visualisation of the word contemplate, as it appears in the dictionary: Contemplare [vc. dotta, lat. contemplari ‘trarre qualche cosa nel proprio orizzonte’, da templum ‘spazio o circolo di osservazione che l’augure descriveva col suo lituo per osservare nell’interno di esso il volo degli uccelli’] (Il nuovo Zingarelli, Vocabolario della lingua italiana, Zanichelli).
I think of a passage from Rilke’s Ninth Elegy, where he says:
…Perhaps we are here to say: home,
bridge, fountain, door, pitcher, fruit tree, window,
at most: column, tower… But to say, understand it well
oh, to say things like that, that in that way, they themselves, in the depths,
never intended to be…
Sabrina Mezzaqui

Sabrina Mezzaqui works at home, not in a studio, in the hills of Bologna, a few kilometres from Ontani’s Vergato and Morandi’s Grizzana. They too worked at home, perhaps a characteristic of the area. Sabrina works sitting at the table, cutting, engraving, folding, threading, thinking and looking out of the window. The world passes you by, always changing, and you observe it, I don’t think she studies it: she lives it, rather. There is a lot of manual skill in her work. There is a lot to do, time seems to thicken. Her work itself is the measure of all the time the artist has. The life that passes and that the work marks out, like the geometric repetition of a litany of tiny, imperceptible variations.
Massimo Minini

Sabrina Mezzaqui was born in Bologna in 1964. She lives and works in Marzabotto (BO).

Room 4

I was a very poised and respectful kid. I liked Careful with that axe, Eugene (Pink Floyd, 1968) very much, with guilt. I gave up the classical guitar and got a stratocaster.
It’s probably only the fault of the plains that I’ve never been able to feel really comfortable in my old studio. When I left it, to finally love it, I slammed all the doors with an axe like Jack Nicholson in The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980). Now I’m working in the Apennines.
Sometimes people get too hung up on doorways and complain that you can’t see anything. It always takes a good Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979. Based on Picnic by the roadside by Arkadij and Boris Strugackij, 1971) as a guide to help them appreciate distance. I have seven degrees of myopia and without lenses I can do it.
Marco Di Giovanni

The future will be in the hands of those who will govern the infinitely small, the invisible part of our reality. In this way, we must agree that science has, in the last century, moved closer to the very disciplines to which it has always been wrongly opposed, namely religion and philosophy.
And this is the point of Marco Di Giovanni’s work, the moment when science goes so far as to return to myth, or perhaps I should say the moments when science and myth overlap, given that these two disciplines have never really been separated, even if sometimes we are no longer able to see their links. The moment when the infinitely large becomes confused with the infinitely small, and when the normal notions of space and time stop working, there is no past and no future, everything will happen and has already happened.
The focus of Marco Di Giovanni’s latest series of works is precisely a sort of indissolubility between scientific research on the one hand, and myth, legend and poetry on the other. As if the two parts could not be separated…
The final effect of many of his installations has the flavour of the whole steampunk culture, with an imaginative power and visionary quality similar to Panamarenko, for example. In both cases these objects seem to contain the most advanced technology, but made with totally archaic materials and techniques, as if they came from a “retro-future” world of indefinite and indefinable date; they could in fact be functional instruments from a planet of a post-atomic future, or from a very ancient past after which our civilisation arrived. Or it could be some kind of parallel universe. Surely these are objects that have nothing to do with the here and now, with our space-time dimension and our context.
Antonio Grulli

Marco di Giovanni was born in Teramo in 1976. He lives and works between Imola (BO) and Solarolo (RA).

Room 3

The Crucifixions began in the 1950s with an interest in mysticism, art history and the theology of the cross (Louis Chardon, John of the Cross, Catherine of Siena, Simone Weil, Emil Cioran and others). All these plastic works do not pretend to be figurations for sacred spaces. They derive from very personal roots. […] It is only to be noted that the pictorial controversies about “presence”, “represence”, “reference” etc., which have raged in the Christian Church for hundreds of years, have long since occupied my thoughts, for it was then that the path to 20th century art began.
Arnulf Rainer

Bleeding
He rose
of violets
A former human limb.
Towards the incarnadine wood
It brought itself.

The Invincible
won,
the Invincible
landed
burned in the embers
screaming
the impossible peace
of who
eternal
loved
the one who
eternally
was to be
only hated.

Giovanni Testori

Arnulf Rainer was born in 1929 in Baden (Vienna). He lives and works between Vienna, Bavaria and Tenerife.