Sofia Bersanelli, Giulia Riva and Elisabetta Polelli
A project by Angelo Barone
Casa Testori

Three young artists, Sofia Bersanelli, Giulia Riva and Elisabetta Polelli, worked with their cameras around the Sacro Monte sculptures on display at Casa Testori (Arriva il gran teatro montano, Casa Testori, 9 April – 8 May 2016).
They were guided by Angelo Barone, himself an artist, photographer and lecturer. The challenge was to understand how artists of the new generations intercept and revisit the forms of our past; what dialogue is created between them and a fascinating monument, but sometimes perceived as “distant”, such as the Sacro Monte of Varallo. The three young artists have interpreted these masterpieces with a great deal of freedom and creativity, each of them creating surprising paths through images.

The products of this workshop were exhibited at Casa Testori. On the occasion of the presentation, Angelo Barone and the artists dialogued with the director of the Ente Sacri Monti Elena De Filippis.

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Emilio Isgrò
Curated by Davide Dall’Ombra
Castello Gamba – Museo d’arte moderna e contemporanea
Châtillon, Valle d’Aosta
6 April – 16 June 2019

EMILIO ISGRÒ. THE 35 BOOKS OF THE BETROTHED, DELETED
Davide Dall’Ombra

«In deleting the work, I came to realise how Manzoni’s writing being so powerful and pure has contributed to our literature second only to Dante. Since in Manzoni, culture too becomes nature».

At the centre of the exhibition Emilio Isgrò’s most impressive work is exhibited: the 35 deleted books dedicated to the most famous pages of The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni.
I Promessi Sposi cancellati per venticinque lettori e dieci appestati is a work from 2016, specifically created for display at Casa Manzoni, in Milan.
It is shown here, not just for its magnificent beauty and because it is illustrative of the poetics of the artist and his renowned deletions, but because it is a useful tool for understanding the creative effect that the intuition of the centrality of the word had on the artist.
This is well expressed in the work of Isgrò housed in Castello Gamba and accessible on a tour of the Museum.
The work is compiled of 35 copies of the novel, opened at symbolic pages, and exhibited in individual plexiglass display cases. The volumes used are an anastatic reprint of the novel’s first edition in its final version (Quarantana); the edition that Manzoni had Alessandro Goin illustrate, under precise instructions. Isgrò, Sicilian artist relocated to Milan, worked on the 70 pages in his usual fashion: he deleted almost all of the text with black ink or white paint, allowing key words to survive, either untouched or permitted to emerge because of the transparency of the marks he made. It is these untouched words that create a new text or better, provide us with a synthetic and poetic key to interpretation of the chosen passage. What might seem offensive reveals itself in fact to be an act of love. Isgrò’s actions throw us into the heart of the text helping us to understand the greatness of Manzoni’s writing.
This is how, when silence is needed, nothing can be said, or newly added, only commas remain, marking the passage of time and to reassure us that something that cannot be described by words is happening. More often than not a few words are left untouched to evoke an entire chapter, like the conversion of the Unnamed: “dio, lo, Dio”. At times the strokes are more pictorial, visible when the two souls of the Nun of Monza appear, simultaneously in black and white.
As regards the other sections, the pictorial beauty of the recreated pages is not lacking and is an essential component of the harmony transmitted by the work. The deletions provide a musical rhythm to the pages and the alternation of black and white is poetic in itself. But it is most certainly the words of Manzoni, trimmed down and smoothen like small, precious rocks that glisten amongst the grooves created by the artist, restoring the text with a greater evocative power. Three simple “ands”, surviving in the emptiness of the page, prolonging the anticipation of a happy ending implicit in the novel, whilst entirely new sentences, like that born of Fra Cristoforo’s instructions, “direte barca rispondete amore” dissolve the lines between writing and figurative art. The greatness of this work lies in this synaesthesia between these two languages.
A novel in general and, as Giovanni Testori underlines, Manzoni in particular, directs the reader, word after word, to the culmination of a feeling, an emotion, rage or pity whichever it arouses, falling in with the rhythm of language and its narration. A work of art, on the other hand, plays out immediately, before the viewer: it is as if we were able to read the entire novel in an instant, said Testori. Writing and figurative art have very different times for fruition: one can make us run or walk, whilst the other obliges us to take an immediate Olympic dive. Here then, with his deletions, Isgrò impresses on literature the breakneck speed of art allowing us to embrace the essence of an entire chapter in the blink of an eye.
Yet, at the same time with a work like this, we are brought, book after book, a stream of characters or photograms, at a pace typical of reading, formed by understanding, appreciation, wonder and profound self-identification.

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THE EXHIBITION

A new exhibition for a new Casa Testori project, desired and supported by the Autonomous Region of Valle d’Aosta. This project has seen Casa Testori conduct a study of the collection of the Castello GambaMuseum, the museum that houses the Valle d’Aosta’s 20th century collection, identifying a number of works and masters capable of acting as a pivot for future enhancement initiatives, so that the Gamba Castle can definitively earn its rightful place as an essential destination for tourists to the castles in the Valle d’Aosta and a favourite haunt of the region’s inhabitants.
The first result of this collaboration is the exhibition Emilio Isgrò. I 35 libri dei Promessi Sposi cancellati(The 35 Cancelled Books of the Betrothed), which displays an important and articulated work by one of the most important Italian conceptual artists, in dialogue with his painting conserved at Castello Gamba: Quel che è scritto (1991), presented for the occasion with new effective interpretations. This is the fifth “episode” of the successful exhibition series Détails, with which Castello Gamba enhances the value of its heritage, drawing the public’s attention to one of the authors present in the collection.

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Giovanni Testori
Curated by Davide Dall’Ombra
In collaboration with Associazione Giovanni Testori
Mart – Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto
28 March – 24 May 2015

THE SAVED PAINTING
Giuseppe Frangi

In 1950 Giovanni Testori was 27 years old. His profile was already that of an intellectual who was difficult to classify, due to the multiplicity of fields in which he was involved. But in that 1950 one of these spheres disappeared, and it was certainly one of his most beloved: painting. 
Testori, hurt by the incomprehension and consequent covering up of the frescoes in the church of San Carlo al Corso in Milan, had decided to end his experience as a painter. In a gesture typical of his temperament, he destroyed the canvases he had painted up to that time and which remained in his studio in Via Santa Marta. Practically only those he had sold or given away were saved. And this Crocifissione (Crucifixion) was saved, which Testori always kept with him until the end. 
It was clear that the Crocifissione, represented by symbols and dated 1949, was something very important to him. Now the discovery by Davide Dall’Ombra of an important series of preparatory drawings for that painting in a Roman collection reinforces that clue. Thanks to these drawings it is possible to follow the development of Testori’s thought and ideas around a work that is certainly the most important and the most ambitious of his painting season, marked by a critical commitment to the return of contemporary art to churches.
On the one hand, Testori showed to be fully in line with the novelties of figurative art in those years, committed to the personal reworking of Picasso’s innovations, but on the other hand he confirmed his extraordinary originality, breaking away from the models and enacting a “staging” of surprising originality both stylistic and iconographic. An articulated and fascinating nucleus that required an adequate contextualisation, capable of considering his critical engagement with his “realist” companions and the medieval sources underlying the iconographic choices made by Testori […].

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THE EXHIBITION

The Mart Museum in Rovereto, one of the most important and innovative contemporary art museums in Italy, hosted “Crocifissione ‘49. I disegni ritrovati”, an exhibition that presented the public with an unexpected Testori. A Testori before “I segreti di Milano”, before Luchino Visconti and Robero Longhi: a very young Testori painter.
In the 1940s, Giovanni Testori, even before being a writer, was in fact known as a painter, an associate of the Milanese school of “Corrente”, a fellow traveller of Ennio Morlotti, Bruno Cassinari and Renato Guttuso. Even his interventions as a militant critic were dictated by the need to find, first and foremost for himself, a viable way forward for Italian realism which, recognising Cèzanne as its father, was willing to go beyond Picasso’s dazzling vision.
These years of experimentation, between 1948 and 1949, were illuminated by the important discovery of 26 drawings, displayed in the exhibition, which illustrate Testori’s creative process that led to the San Carlo frescoes and one of the rare works that escaped destruction: the Crocifissione (Crucifixion) signed and dated 1949, the most important painting by Giovanni Testori, which brought this phase of his artistic life to a close following the disappointment at the fading of the frescoes.
Unique in Testori’s pictorial production, this group of papers allows us to follow his creative process step by step, at a time of great formal and iconographic research.

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Andrea Bianconi
Curated by Giuseppe Frangi
Casa Circondariale “Francesco Di Cataldo”
San Vittore, Milan
3rd April and 9th May 2019

ANDREA BIANCONI AT SAN VITTORE
Giuseppe Frangi

The artist is present: this is the distinctive mark of the artistic form of performance. The artist comes into play with his body in order to rediscover an intensity of relationship with the world around him, which the work itself seems no longer able to guarantee. In short, performance is that simple and extreme form through which the artist says to the world: “I am here”. The sense of this “being present” is that it is always a destabilising element, because it introduces other logics and other points of view. With the performance, the artist puts himself in play, without mediation; above all, he is called upon to prove a radical sincerity, which shakes and creates short circuits.
Sincerity is one of Andrea Bianconi’s defining qualities; an artist who always plays it close to the vest, even when working with traditional media, but who finds his most congenial field of expression in performance. Born in Vicenza in 1974, Bianconi has performed in every corner of the world, from Moscow to Shanghai, Venice to New York. Each time he makes incursions like a true corsair, following unpredictable scripts that amuse, sometimes move, but always take you by surprise. In his performances, Bianconi transforms himself into a fairy-tale character, a pure and wild hero who enchants us with his strange rituals and bizarre catchphrases.
Andrea had long dreamed of being able to do a performance in a sensitive place like a prison. I believe that the reason for this lies in a very simple fact: for Bianconi, performance is first and foremost an experience of freedom, because it is a space for action that does not obey a logic, let alone a rule. A space in which the artist is not called upon to deal with a “why”. Freedom is guaranteed by the fact that the performance is once and for all; once it has happened it dematerialises and lives only in the documentation of what has happened. This means that there is no object to sell and therefore the performance is also free from the rules imposed by the market. Bringing an experience of such profound freedom to a place like the Panopticon from which the rays of San Vittore radiate is, as you can easily imagine, a significant event. It is a first-hand verification of freedom as an irreducible factor of human nature. Bianconi then adds other elements that reinforce this dimension.
The performance takes place around the cages: they are an oppressive symbol. The cage is clearly an emblem of a condition of confinement and a symptom of existential fragility. On the one hand, the cage separates us from the world, but on the other it also protects us from the world. Bianconi’s intervention produces a short circuit and calls into question these instinctive certainties. His cages, which fly around hanging in space, with their doors regularly open, are not only emptied of all their negativity, but are called upon to participate in an unexpected and bizarre ritual, which transforms them into cheerful creatures out of place and out of function. So much so that at the centre of the Panopticon, on the podium where the priest sits for Mass on Sundays, Bianconi has placed a sculpture that is nothing more than a cage that has been eviscerated and “opened” as if it had been transformed into the corolla of a flower. The cage, under the action of the magician Bianconi, changes its nature in every sense. The performance, with its verbal catchphrases, becomes a celebration, a rite of thanks for this transfiguration.
The other characteristic of Bianconi’s presence in San Vittore is perfectly connected to what we have described so far. The arrow is a tautological sign: there is no need to assign it a meaning. The meaning of the arrow is contained in the simple strokes that make it up and which express a going, a moving, a leaving. The arrow is the antithesis of the status quo. It is an instinct that looks beyond. It is the frank expression of an expectation. It is a desire for change. It is an attempt to give oneself a direction. Bianconi’s arrows, which mark Marco Casentini’s coloured walls in the entrance corridor, carry all these possible messages.Andrea Bianconi’s presence in San Vittore is the result of a project developed with Casa Testori. I think it is important to underline this because in this way a sensitivity that had distinguished Giovanni Testori, as a person and as an intellectual, is renewed. Testori had come to San Vittore several times and had solicited a different kind of attention from the city. Being here, bringing an artistic gesture that speaks of freedom and desire for change, is a way to renew his conviction that culture must always mix with life in order to be true.

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THE PERFORMANCE

Come costruire una direzione (How to build a direction), elaborated by Andrea Bianconi with the production of Casa Testori, is a performance staged during the 2019 Milan ArtWeek in the San Vittore prison, inside the famous Panopticon from which the six rays of the Milan prison structure depart. 
Andrea Bianconi has set up 24 cages – one of the symbols of the artist’s poetics – which have been positioned in front of the gates of the six rays. The cages, of course, are a mirror reflection of the prison condition, but Bianconi’s action wanted to overturn the sign and give them a liberating connotation: they were the cages of our desires, whose doors are therefore always open. 
On the central podium of the Panopticon, where Holy Mass is celebrated on Sundays, Bianconi had placed a large sculpture made for the occasion: a cage whose walls were opened almost to form a flower and, symbolically, wings, another symbol of Bianconi’s art. The performance was attended by the CETEC Dentro/Fuori San Vittore company, which includes some of the female inmates. With them, Bianconi sang a pressing, obsessive and utopian tune, repeating the words “Fantastic Planet” hundreds of times, following a script set by the artist. “Fantastic Planet“, because, as the artist explains, it is the product of everyone’s imagination. And imagination is an intrinsically free factor, not one that can be “imprisoned”.

The performance in San Vittore was a deeply felt performance by the artist because – unlike what had happened previously – he was not alone. At his side were 10 female inmates, special actresses who sang and repeated with him, almost obsessively, the claim “Fantastic Planet“, because everyone can always imagine their own fantastic world.

If the cage is the place of a desire to be freed, the arrow becomes the symbol of this desire taking flight. Therefore the performance ended with the singing of a nursery rhyme written by Bianconi to the tune of a popular children’s song entitled La Freccia (The Arrow). The nursery rhyme was first sung by the artist alone, then repeated with the prisoners.

“I am enthusiastic about this experience, San Vittore is a special, delicate place and my performance is intended to convey the message that for everyone there is a possibility, a perspective, an opening through which to free their desires”, said Andrea Bianconi.

“Art brought inside the walls of a prison can be an experience of great value, if, through the beauty and unpredictability of its proposals, it succeeds in stimulating positive paths of awareness and change”. These are the words of Giacinto Siciliano, director of the San Vittore prison, which encapsulate the profound meaning of the performance to which, not by chance, Andrea Bianconi has given the almost programmatic title of Come costruire una direzione.

The project also included an exhibition of 50 drawings displayed for a month in the long corridor leading to the Panopticon rotunda, with the arrow as the dominant motif. 

The arrow, in Bianconi’s grammar, is a sort of happy obsession, giving form to the irrepressible need to desire. The arrow is liberating energy, but it is also direction: it therefore indicates a possible path, which is unique and unrepeatable for each person, a positive sign carried within an environment marked by its nature by opposing dynamics. But as Bianconi explains, “art is always open to the future, even when it conveys dramatic messages. As far as I am concerned, the title of the exhibition gives a clear indication, which I instinctively feel is mine: I tend to look at the good and not the bad. For me, art is a matter of courage that stimulates other courage in people”.

Castello Sforzesco, 16 March – 3 April 2016
Casa Testori, 9 April – 8 May 2016
MVSA, Museo Valtellinese di Storia e Arte, 14 May – 6 June 2016

THE EXHIBITION

There is something extraordinary about this “transfer” of two of the most famous sculptures from the Sacro Monte of Varallo to Casa Testori. The unprecedented aspect lays in seeing for once a piece of the Sacro Monte outside its natural context. To see it up close, to be able to walk around it, to study it.
For the visitors it was an experience destined to stimulate unprecedented gazes, unexpected short circuits, in front of these bodies so boldly at odds with one another.
Following the restoration carried out by the Bottega Gritti, which has given us back an astonishing “authentic” vision of the two sculptures, new problems have opened up for scholars, and with the problems new hypotheses on which to shed light.
Certainly, no better opportunity than this could have been foreseen to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the publication of that fundamental book by Giovanni Testori, which brought the greatness of Gaudenzio Ferrariand the fascination of the Sacro Monte di Varallo to the attention of a vast public. Today that book is back in a new edition, edited by Giovanni Agosti, and published by the same publisher as at the time, Feltrinelli: and this is another reason to celebrate. The title of the book has almost become the claim of the Sacro Monte of Varallo: “Il gran teatro montano”.
An extraordinary book, which Giovanni put in the coffin of his father Edoardo, a fundamental figure for the writer, to whom an exhibition was dedicated in the “Testori” room on the first floor, 50 years after his death.
A fragment of the “great theatre” has left its age-old stage, to conquer, we are sure, new audiences. So, Casa Testori hosted the Gran teatro montano, with the touching and at the same time impressive scene of the Christ of the Passion dragged by a Manigoldo. Two real bodies, in dialectic with each other. A sculpture that has in its genes the expansion towards scenic action. A highly contagious fragment of theatre, which encouraged many visitors to go and discover, or rediscover, Varallo, the “eighth wonder of the world”, as Oscar winner Toni Servillo called it.

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THE STAGES

Castello Sforzesco
16 March – 3 April 2016

At the centre of room XVII of the Civic Museum of Milan, dedicated to sculpture, the exhibition of the two statues provided an exceptional all-round view, thanks to a precise comparison with some statues preserved there, capable of highlighting affinities and differences with Gaudenzian sculpture of the Sacro Monte: from the head attributed to Gaudenzio Ferrari, to the Magdalene by Giovanni Angelo Del Maino, acquired by the Municipality of Milan and presented for the occasion.

Casa Testori
9 April – 8 May 2016

MVSA, Museo Valtellinese di Storia e Arte
14 May – 6 June 2016

SIDE EVENTS

Presentation of the restoration of the two sculptures
Castello Sforzesco, Sala Bertarelli
4 April 2016

Presentation to the public of the results of the restoration work carried out on the two statues, in the presence of the director of the Ente Sacri Monti Elena De Filippis and restorers Eugenio and Luciano Gritti. The presentation was an opportunity for numerous scholars to see the two sculptures live and to take part in the attributional debate on the Manigoldo, visible in its original colour.

Presentation of the new edition of “Il gran teatro montano”
Villa Venino Municipal Library, Novate Milanese
16 April 2016

Presentation of the new edition of the book edited by Giovanni Agosti, at the presence of the author, the director of Casa Testori Davide Dall’Ombra, the director of Ente Sacri Monti Elena De Filippis and the Feltrinelli editorial director Alberto Rollo.

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Anna Caruso
Curated by Davide Dall’Ombra
Casa Testori
21 June – 10 November 2019

I PIANI FORTI
Davide Dall’Ombra

“My paintings are based on a distinction between illustrated space and abstract pictorial space. The former is mimetic and referential, while the latter is transformative, entirely incarnated by the dynamics of the paint, because formalist abstraction does not attempt to achieve a represented subject and claims the space it wishes to inhabit. I know. It’s the most self-referential form of painting possible, but it’s (also) my own”. 

The exhibition held by Anna Caruso on the first floor of Casa Testori includes a series of works on paper and installations, immersive wall drawings, and new paintings, almost all of which were created especially for the occasion, experimenting with new techniques and allowing herself to be interrogated by the ideas of belonging and of breaking away characteristic of the figure of Giovanni Testori and easy to find between the walls of his house, now a cultural hub in its tenth year of experimentation in a number of areas, including young contemporary art. 

In her solo show at Thomas Masters Gallery in Chicago last January, Anna added a new tile to the mosaic of her study of human perception of reality, enquiring into the subjective vision of time and the synaesthesia that affect our memories. 

The focus of her study is in fact reality as it is filtered, and, in a certain sense, erased, taken apart and put back together again in our memories, visible in paintings featuring geometric stripes that create infinitely multiplied planes and spaces. In a rhythm combining natural and artificial elements of flora, fauna and architecture, the artist obliges us to glide over these planes with a kind of motion that, in terms of perception, cannot help leading us to pursue emotions and memories.
Our own. 

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THE EXHIBITION

As we climb the steps of the staircase, we are greeted by the work that gives the exhibition its title, La casa intorno al vaso (The house around the vase), a vase that is evoked and not represented, as a symbol of the house itself, which is capable of embracing the emptiness of existence; indeed, just like the vase, it draws its nature and function from surrounding an absence.
In the large bedroom, a canvas over four metres long opens up the back wall towards the rocky mountains and three superimposed planes of transparent PVC dilate the inclined planes of the artist’s and the observer’s imaginary perspective. On the walls of the next room the famous Crocifissione (Crucifixion) of 1949, painted by Testori, and the artist’s personal tribute face each other: a work of the same format and, probably, subject as much as possible to sincerity and contamination, both personal and of our time.

Four portraits of equal format stand in front of the large bookcase. They are Giovanni Testori and his mother, the artist and her father. Affections and tensions, inevitably constructive and destructive at the same time, intertwine in a profound dialogue of the unexpected, between cultural history and affections. 
In Testori’s room as a boy, the theme of the nude on the walls – once in canvases attributed to Géricault and Courbet, now in the work dedicated to them by Andrea Mastrovito (2011) – inspires Caruso with an intimate work, the child of the installation presented at the Elfo Puccini Theatre last year, in which a cloud of hundreds of drawings caresses the visitor. 

The final small room welcomes worlds that expand once again. Anna paints all the walls with a large wall drawing and the floor covered with a canvas, but the painting gives itself no boundaries, climbing the steps leading to the attic and interacting with the large conifer in the garden, which stands out beyond the window.

THE ARTIST

Anna Caruso was born in Cernusco sul Naviglio (MI) in 1980. In 2004 she graduated in painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Bergamo. She lives and works in Milan. She has worked with galleries in Italy and abroad, including Studio d’Arte Cannaviello in Milan, Anna Marra Contemporanea in Rome and Thomas Masters Gallery in Chicago (USA).

Giovanni Testori e i suoi artisti, da Courbet a Guttuso
A project by Casa Testori
Curated by Davide dall’Ombra
Castello Gamba – Museo d’arte moderna e contemporanea
Châtillon, Valle d’Aosta
12 July – 29 September 2019

FROM COURBET TO ZIMMER. THROUGH THE EYES OF TESTORI 
Davide Dall’Ombra

What does it mean for an artist to experience the mountain and relate it to us?
Giovanni Testori (1923-1993) was one of the most fertile Italian intellectuals of the 20th century, active in many fields of culture, making his mark as painter, writer, poet, dramatist, journalist and art critic. Indeed, Testori is one of the artists present in the collection of Castello Gamba, which conserves his splendid Tramonto [Sunset] (Actus tragicus) of 1967. Visitors are invited to let themselves be transported by Testori’s works and words towards a discovery of the mountain heights. Heights depicted in an exciting array of paintings, heights that dominate the lives of those living among them, and heights experienced and related directly by Testori himself. Testori’s relationship with the mountain, moreover, was not only a leitmotif accompanying his painting, his poetry and his critical writing throughout his life, it marked his debut. His very first article, published in “Via Consolare” in 1941 when he was only 17, was about a painting of a mountain: Giovanni Segantini’s masterpiece, Alpe di maggio [Alpine Pastures in May] (1891), of which Testori published a previously unexhibited preparatory study. It should come as no surprise if his preferred stance of intimate perception also conditioned his outlook as art critic. He remained always ready to extol with his words the paintings of those great artists of the 19th and 20th century which he loved and collected. 
The chapter could only open with Gustave Courbet, the revolutionary artist who Testori considered the father of the informal, capable, as no one else could, of rediscovering for us the “mother-matter” of nature. Courbet the artist stands as a sort of manifesto for Testori and for the entire exhibition, not only because he belongs chronologically to the beginning of our journey, but because Testori the critic deemed him the father of all modern painting. Courbet taught all the painters who came after him that matter, not the world of ideas, is the terrain on which pictorial truth is played. Strictly related to Courbet is Paolo Vallorz, an artist from Trento, but Parisian by adoption. Vallorz conserved the teaching of the French master in his pictorial patterns, in which he worked out his unconditional love for the Val di Sole (Trento). It was Vallorz’s extraordinary symbiosis with the life and feelings of the mountain and its people that so enchanted Testori. 
Renato Guttuso’s fiery sunsets inevitably enliven the chromatic range of our exhibition. Guttuso was a Sicilian who, bewitched by the sight of Monte Rosa, made his house at Velate, in Varese, into an atelier where he created many of his most famous works. “Guttuso at Varese”, indeed, was the theme of an exhibition strongly promoted by Testori, and which opened with this very pastel: “one of those blazing, besotted farewells; flung onto the paper with dazzling freedom (and yet the substance is that of the pastel, immediate, crumbling and delicate)”. Thus Testori sealed, in 1984, over 40 years’ friendship and collaboration with Guttuso, embracing articles, reviews and introductions to catalogues. Testori dedicated many pages to the painter who, whatever their ideological differences, had been a major interlocutor ever since the passionate years of Italian Realism, during the war and the ensuing years of reconstruction. 
Varlin, the talented artist from Zurich who chose to live among the mountains of Val Bondasca, in the Swiss canton of Grisons, close to the Giacometti home in Stampa, is the creator of some of the most extraordinary snow scenes in the history of European art. Works which enthralled Testori, and were decisive for his own commitment to painting. Together with Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Testori was the greatest spokesman for this painter, in whom he found all he was seeking in art: drama – also in the theatrical sense of the word – and the truth of domestic life-patterns. An art that spares no one, where daily life is always exalted to the level of the universal. 
We pay homage, lastly, to Bernd Zimmer, the German painter “discovered” by Testori, who fell in love with his views of nature, with his fiery, visionary mountains. Zimmer was a leading exponent of the so-called “Neue Wild”, artists from Berlin who sought fortune in Italy in the 1980s and found one of their most important spokesmen in Testori. The energy released by these artists’ paintings provided a decisive stimulus for Testori in his role of militant critic, committed as he then was to promoting young painters from Italy and beyond. He curated a number of exhibitions on this theme, and reviewed others for the “Corriere della Sera”, the artistic page of which he edited from 1977 until his death. 

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La passione di Cristo secondo Giovanni Testori
Curated by Davide Dall’Ombra and Andrea Marmori
In collaboration with Associazione Giovanni Testori
Museo Civico “Amedeo Lia”, La Spezia
25 March – 27 May 2018

AN UNEXPECTED GUEST
Giuseppe Frangi

Giovanni Testori (1923-1993) would have been madly in love with the Museo Lia. And not only because these walls contain works by some of the artists he loved most as an art critic: from Vincenzo Foppa to Giacomo Ceruti.
He would have loved it because this museum tells the story of one of the great European collectors of the last century, restoring its physiognomy. The writer would certainly have dedicated fiery words to it in the pages of the “Corriere della Sera”, in which he edited the page dedicated to art for almost twenty years.
Testori was also a voracious, restless and dilapidated collector: he lived on paintings and there are countless works of ancient and modern art that passed through his hands. It is not surprising to see some of them again in these rooms in La Spezia, where they may have come through the gallery owner Bruno Lorenzelli or the critic Federico Zeri.
But Giovanni Testori was one of the most versatile and important intellectuals of the Italian twentieth century, and his unconditional love for painting led him to personally try his hand at artistic creation, becoming a painter of significant achievements that have been rediscovered in recent years.
In this exhibition, 25 years after his death, we have chosen to investigate a central theme of his production: the Cross and the Crucifixion, two of the most common subjects in the history of Western art, with numerous occurrences in the Museo Lia, and investigated by Testori throughout his life: as a playwright, poet and, indeed, painter.
Visitors will find two cycles of paintings and drawings, made in the 1940s and 1980s, more than thirty years apart, presented here in their entirety and together for the first time, to create an unprecedented dialogue with the Museum’s Crosses: from Lippo di Benivient to the medieval goldsmiths of Limoges.

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THE EXHIBITION

Realized for the twenty-fifth anniversary of Giovanni Testori’s death, the exhibition “(In)Croci al Museo Lia” proposed an interesting dialogue between the works of the critic-painter and the museum’s permanent collection.
A cycle of Testori’s Crucifixions, created in the 1980s, stood side by side with ancient painted Crucifixions and goldsmith’s products from the Amedeo Lia collection in La Spezia. 
Amedeo Lia was one of the greatest collectors of fourteenth-century Italian painting, thanks to the guidance and supervision of the critic Federico Zeri. These precious panels are called to an unexpected confrontation with Testori’s all-twentieth-century approach. The compositional calm is questioned by the upset and restless sign of Testori’s pastels.

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