A project by Casa Testori
Curated by Davide Dall’Ombra
Castello Gamba – Museo d’arte moderna e contemporanea
Châtillon, Valle d’Aosta
22 June – 25 September 2022

L’ultima guerra di Mario Schifano 1988-1998 is the exhibition that the Castello Gamba – Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea of the Autonomous Region of Valle d’Aosta dedicates to the great protagonist of 20th century painting from 22 June to 25 September 2022. The artist (1934-1998) is one of the most important presences in the museum’s permanent collection with Calore locale, Collinare, Per vedere, Orizzontale and Vista interrotta, works that are the result of a period of residence by Schifano in Valle D’Aosta between February and March 1988 and that are presented in the exhibition with an unprecedented arrangement in relation to the landscape that inspired them. Schifano worked feverishly in a wing of the former priory of Saint-Bénin, producing dozens and dozens of paintings, along with works on paper, that were exhibited at the Tour Fromage in the exhibition Mario Schifano. Verde fisico, held from 30 April to 24 July 1988.

The exhibition L’ultima guerra di Mario Schifano 1988-1998 – a project by Casa Testori, curated by Davide Dall’Ombra and realised by the Autonomous Region of Valle d’Aosta, Department of Cultural Heritage, Tourism, Sport and Commerce – has as its starting point the Valle d’Aosta episode of 1988 and aims to explore the last extraordinary years of Schifano’s career, up to his death in 1998. An unrepeatable decade for the artist: feverish and prolific years, perhaps contradictory, of hand-to-hand struggle with works, of return to painting and of ‘war’ with painting itself, as with his own addictions and obsessions, years marked by the usual and unstoppable creative urgency.

In the beginning was “Chimera”
The major works from the 1980s and 1990s on show are introduced by a video, curated by Casa Testori, which recounts the birth of Chimera, the monumental work created by Schifano during a one-night-only performance in Florence in 1985. A pivotal moment for understanding the strength of Schifano’s pictorial gesture and the communicative nature of his work, which well explains the climate in which the artist’s intention to live in Valle d’Aosta a few years later was born. This is a pivotal episode in understanding Schifano’s confrontation with archaeology, fundamental to his training and also central to his paintings in Valle d’Aosta.

Masterpieces for a Glance
In the dramatic months that Europe is experiencing nowadays, the “portraits” of war in the proper sense that Schifano dedicates to the Gulf crisis appear painfully topical. It is a period, since the late 1980s, in which the artist is particularly affected by the media and multimedia. During the years of voluntary confinement in his studio-house, television became for him a window on the world and an obsessive source of inspiration. Turning his attention to the main news events of the time, he gives us his own, poignant view of the war, expressed in works that are inseparable from his career. In the main room dedicated to temporary exhibitions, two monumental works dedicated to the drama of the war in Iraq are presented: Tearful [In lacrime] of 1990, which has become a sort of ideal self-portrait of the artist, and Sorrisi Scomparsi of 1991, the only possible face of the tragedy in Kuwait. In Tearful, the drama of war is seen from the inside of the father-son relationship, starting with a photo cut from «Time» of 10 December 1990, where a child looks on bewildered while his soldier father, leaving for the front, bows his head covering his face in tears. In Sorrisi scomparsi a crowd of new faceless faces are overlaid by the Arabic translation of the work’s title and give substance to the collective drama of Kuwait.

The pictorial reworking of TV images goes hand in hand with the photographic one. Schifano sends dozens of rolls of film a day to print: photos taken of TV screens that accumulate in his studio in bunches and are involved in a process that is both devouring and germinating.

The exhibition presents four large plexiglass-framed panel compositions (293 x 186 cm each) featuring more than 1.300 10×15 cm photographs retouched in oil and felt-tip pen, taken between the late 1980s and early 1990s. They are the result of the artist’s voracious eye and personality: “I feel like a media… Through this window [the TV] I capture the images that most strike me, the messages from the dramatic reality that presses upon us. But I am not a passive spectator. As I follow the dizzying succession of events on the video, I think, reflect, create”. An endless production that Emilio Mazzoli called “Schifano’s ‘rosary”, poured out during the day at every free opportunity, in an attempt to leave an imprint on what was happening around him.

Homage to Emilio Mazzoli
The exhibition was also created with the intention of celebrating the 80th birthday of a pivotal figure in Schifano’s career, Emilio Mazzoli, one of Italy’s most important gallery owners and his passionate supporter in those years. For the occasion, Mazzoli has generously made available to Castello Gamba – thanks to his relationship of collaboration and esteem with Casa Testori – the germinal works by Schifano presented and will exceptionally be on show with his double portrait, never exhibited before, executed by Schifano between 1994 and 1995: CARO EMILIO CONTINUA… (print and mixed media on paper applied on board, 180 x 135 cm each). A tribute to a key figure in post-war Italian artistic culture, capable of grasping the value of the artist in his early days and determined to support and accompany him, also thanks to the involvement of the most revolutionary critical pens of his time, such as Giovanni Testori and Achille Bonito Oliva.

Schifano among his nature
The upper part of the castle is dedicated to the precise reconstruction, through works, documents, images and unpublished testimonies, of the story of Schifano’s staying in Aosta in 1988, thanks to the discovery of an unpublished photographic campaign of the exhibition and beautiful photos of Schifano at work in his studio in Aosta. This pivotal episode was part of a lively cultural moment in Valle d’Aosta, with the establishment of the Regional Exhibitions Office in 1986 and a particular focus on exhibition activities of an international nature. The energy of the patrons and the commitment of art critics such as Janus (Roberto Gianoglio, 1927-2020), led to the realisation of original exhibition events, often monographic in nature, with a continuous flow of dozens of exhibitions a year, between 1986 and 1995, for a total of over one hundred. Artists were invited to exhibit their works, sharing them with the community, and the exhibitions also allowed an important enrichment of the Region’s collections. This is documented in the exhibition by the Fabbri “Valle d’Aosta Cultura” series, presented in the room of the Gamba Museum dedicated to the Valle’s commissions.

ENTRANCE
Price included in the Museum entrance fee

OPENING HOURS
Every day from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.

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Margaux Bricler, Binta Diaw, Zehra Doğan, Iva Lulashi,
Giorgia Ohanesian Nardin, Iman Salem

In dialogue with: Carol Rama and Giovanni Testori
Curated by Rischa Paterlini with Giuseppe Frangi
Casa Testori
2 April – 25 June 2022
Graphic project: CH RO MO/Roberto Montani.

After the experience of the exhibition Libere Tutte in 2019, Casa Testori continues the path dedicated to what Lea Vergine had renamed “the other half of art” and adds a piece to the story written by many feminist artists at the end of the 1960s by addressing with more radicality themes related to the body and the entity.

SEGNI DI ME. Il corpo, un palcoscenico presents six young artists born between 1985 and 1995, called to interact with a great figure of the recent past, Carol Rama. At the centre of their work is the relationship with the body, which becomes the terrain of artistic expression. Powerful and sometimes provocative works enter the rooms of Casa Testori, insisting on subjective experiences, criticising the painful legacy of sexism, violence and other power structures of contemporary culture. 
These works provide new and valuable insights into both historical and contemporary art. The exhibition is conceived as if it were a play, with the help of a wide range of media including paintings, sculptures, performances, drawings and photographs. An eighth protagonist then enters the scene, the host Giovanni Testori, with a series of large drawings from the mid-1970s that have the female body as their subject.

Curated by Rischa Paterlini with Giuseppe Frangi, the exhibition brings to the rooms of the Novate Milanese residence, in addition to Carol Rama and Giovanni Testori, the works of Margaux Bricler, Binta Diaw, Zehra Doğan, Iva Lulashi, Giorgia Ohanesian Nardin and Iman Salem.

Interweaving the eroticism of Iva Lulashi’s painting, the sensuality of Binta Diaw’s photographs, Zehra Doğan’s deformed figures, Margaux Bricler’s sculptures or sphinxes, animal, female and demonic figures, Giorgi Ohanesian Nardin’s long live performance and Iman Salem’s photographs, with the historical works of Carol Rama and Giovanni Testori, the exhibition stages stories in which carnality and passion mix. By being represented, the body becomes objectified: this mechanism is the direct criticism not only of the visual clichés we are used to, but also of the ways of viewing it.

The young artists invited, highlighting their commitment to reclaiming the body and going beyond the historical legacy of feminism, have developed works of great intensity, generating an encounter-counterpoint that finds further reflection where each element is a fragment of a body on an empty stage. These fragments of works-bodies make it possible to achieve balances of considerable formal and aesthetic intensity that are highly involving for visitors.The exhibition was inspired by the words on the invitation that African-American artist Kara Walker wrote for her first solo show in New York at the Wooster Gardens/Brent Sikkema gallery in 1995, “The High and Soft Laughter of the N*****s Wenches at Night”, which read as follows: «Don’t miss the incredible “paper story” of a black woman in slavery who tells of her extraordinary escape to freedom». These words are put in relation to those of an article that Giovanni Testori wrote in 1979 for the front page of the Corriere della Sera, La vergogna dello stupro (The shame of rape): «We would not want that, as is happening with other shames and crimes, by dint of talking, writing and discussing about them, without ever taking responsibility for a gesture, we would end up accustoming man to what is not human. The habit of everything is one of the greatest risks that man is running; the negative impulse that wants to reduce him to a “thing” is leading him to it. Now the end point of this risk cannot be a new consciousness, but the darkness and the night that opens up over the eliminated or destroyed consciousness».

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THE PROJECT

The rooms on the ground floor of Casa Testori are dedicated to site-specific works by Margaux Bricler, Binta Diaw, Zehra Doğan and Iva Lulashi. For the opening Giorgia Ohanesian Nardin and Iman Salem will present a performance that will be documented in the exhibition with photographs taken by Iman Salem. On the walls of the large hall, there is a tribute to the artist Carol Rama, whose work has proved to be a valuable reference for many contemporary women artists, in particular for her modern vision of femininity and her way of representing her own body since the 1930s, intolerant of bourgeois constraints and hypocrisies. Intense works from the 1960s celebrating an identity that was both refined and animalistic, and which anticipated a new way of feeling: materials such as rubber, glass eyes, skins, hair and nails are elements that recur in these works, true enactments of her own identity.

My works – said the artist in 1997 answering a question form Corrado Levi – will be very much liked by those who have suffered, and who have not known how to get out of suffering… Because having had a mother in a psychiatric clinic and having also felt well in that environment there… Because I started in that way there to be with gestures and ways without preparation neither cultural nor of etiquette… I believe that everyone will love those gestures more, because they are gestures that, for reasons that I don’t dare to say, belong to everyone… Because madness is close to everyone… And there are absolutely those who deny it… And those who deny it are just mad, melancholic, sad, unapproachable… Because it is like culture. Culture is a privilege, which I could have done too… But I have always felt more flexible to drawing, to a painting, a story, a composition.

A room on the ground floor allows the works to be viewed only from the outside, through a hole. Inside are some works that Giovanni Testori created in 1975 and exhibited at the Galleria del Naviglio in Milan: large graphite papers with close-ups on female anatomical subjects.

The exhibition has been realised thanks to the collaboration of Galleria del Ponte, Turin and Prometeogallery, Milan and thanks to the support of Banca Generali and Art Defender. 

Catalogue with texts by: Corrado Levi, Giovanni Testori, Giuseppe Frangi, Rischa Paterlini, Marlene L. Müller.

Emma Ciceri
A project by Casa Testori
Curated by Gabi Scardi
Produced by Dok Mobile
Castello Sforzesco, Museo della Pietà Rondanini
14 September – 12 October 2021
Casa Testori
9-30 November 2021

On the occasion of Milan Art Week 2021, the Castello Sforzesco Museums, from 14 September to 12 October, presented Nascita Aperta by Emma Ciceri, a Casa Testori project curated by Gabi Scardi. 
The work – two videos projected simultaneously – was set up in the restored spaces of the former Spanish Hospital, since 2015 home to the Pietà Rondanini Museum.

Nascita Aperta (Open Birth) is the performance that the artist has created with her daughter in front of Michelangelo’s Pietà Rondanini, the last sculpture he worked on. The daily experience of mother and daughter is that of bodies that, out of necessity, stay close to each other, in many gestures of absolute normality. That daily ritual has been carried and relived by them in long moments spent in front of Michelangelo’s work, where Mother and Son find themselves similarly close in a relationship that binds their bodies into a sculptural unicum. 
«We bring our daily experience of visiting the body of a work: Michelangelo’s Pietà Rondanini. – explains Emma Ciceri – We spent time with the sculpture, letting the encounter become what it is for our bodies in the home environment: a possibility of research. In the Pietà Rondanini, the embrace between mother and child creates a vital flow that does not allow us to distinguish where life ends and death begins; the sculpture has become a source of questions for us about the relationship between our bodies, and for us, it has become a source of inspiration». 
«Nascita Aperta is a self-portrait and, at the same time, a metaphor for a relationship in which two lives are inextricably linked», explains the curator Gabi Scardi. «It is also a declaration of adherence to life and form, not for what it must be, but for what it is. In insisting on bodies, gestures, on those rituals of contact and care, Emma Ciceri’s images are objective, explicit, yet interior; interior is the time they impose, going beyond all contingency».
«The relationship between mother and daughter, unveiled by Emma Ciceri in the folds of a touching and intimate humanity, is compared with the image of Mother and Son in Michelangelo’s last work», says Giovanna Mori, Curator of the Museo della Pietà. «The artist expresses herself with confident abandon, managing to highlight the extraordinary topicality of a masterpiece that Michelangelo created without any commission, laying bare her soul».

The work, which consists of two videos projected simultaneously, was set up in one of the restored niches of the former Spanish Hospital. «We are very grateful to the management of Castello Sforzesco for making possible both the realisation of this work of great human and emotional value and its presentation in this space adjacent to Michelangelo’s masterpiece, so beloved by Giovanni Testori», said Giuseppe Frangi, vice-president of Casa Testori, the cultural association that supported the production of Emma Ciceri’s videos.
«Having identified a convergence with respect to the Pietà Rondanini, with its figures dramatically fused even beyond the last breath, shows how culture is constitutive of individual and collective memory, and vice versa, experience, even the most cogent, is substantiated through assimilated, incorporated images» concludes Gabi Scardi.

Curated by Davide Dall’Ombra
Palazzo Bisaccioni, Jesi
12 December 2021 – 27 March 2022

The Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Jesi presents an important anthological exhibition of the work of the American painter William Congdon (1912-1998), an exceptional interpreter of the twentieth century whose painting gave a face to the human quest of the short century, thanks to an anthropological investigation that resulted in paintings of great lyrical power, between the city and man-made nature.
The exhibition is a project of the cultural association Casa Testori and presents a collection of works generously made available by the William G. Congdon Foundation – which safeguards the painter’s work – and specially selected by Davide Dall’Ombra, director of Casa Testori.
An exhaustive and unexpected journey of more than 30 paintings, often of large dimensions, conceived for the spaces of Palazzo Bisaccioni: from the New Yorks of the 1940s and the Venices loved and collected by Peggy Guggenheim, to the metaphysical landing place of the Campi arati of the 1980s and 1990s.
The visitor will be able to move his gaze from the disruptive energy of the American language of Action Painting, of which Congdon was an interpreter, through his early experiences of travelling to his chosen cities. Thus the imposing Rome of the Pantheon‘s vestiges comes to terms with an existential representation of architecture, represented by the chasm of the Colosseo or the precariousness of the city of Assisi, crumbling on the hillside.
In the exhibition, Congdon’s “portraiture” of cities is illustrated one after the other by imposing paintings of Istanbul, the Taj Mahal, the human-marked desert of the Sahara and the Santorini chasm.
As a counterpoint to the torments and splendours of civilisations, Congdon descends into the minutiae of existence, crossing the metaphor of the animal which, like nature, must come to terms with the violence of man. It is thus that the cycle of the Tori (bulls) becomes a metaphor for the cruel pursuit, expressed in our traditions, as in the pursuit of our own desires. But even a humiliated, wounded and doomed bull can be – writes Congdon – redeemed by the artist, who eternalizes its greatness and power through painting. From painting as redemption to the human symbol of suffering and resurrection par excellence, the Crocifisso (Crucifix), the step is short. However, the American artist’s approach is never aesthetic or theoretical and his approach to the sacred subject only comes after his tormented conversion to Catholicism.
The move to the south of Milan focuses his point of view on an almost unique subject: cultivated fields. It is in the last twenty years of his life that the research, from spatial, becomes temporal and the power of the earth and its transformations become the protagonists. These are not idyllic visions: the horizon unfolds over the fields and the human process operated on the surface is followed. It is a torment, also of a material nature, that seems to find peace in the Nebbie (Mists) and the monochromes, culminating in the musical lyricism of the vegetation that concludes the exhibition.
Thus, the meditations on George Braque and Nicolas De Staël re-emerge, but above all, the pictorial dialogues with the New York School linked to Betty Parsons’ gallery, which led to the presence of Congdon’s works in the most important American museums and in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice.
William Congdon is one of the most profound painters of the 20th century, a naturalised Italian but always American in his artistic attitude. Some of the most important international critics have written about him, including: Clement Greenberg, Jacques Maritain, Giulio Carlo Argan, Giovanni Testori, Peter Selz, Fred Licht, and Massimo Cacciari.

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OPENING HOURS
Monday-Sunday: 9:30 a.m. – 1 p.m.; 3:30 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.

Gianriccardo Piccoli and Alessandro Verdi
Curated by Giuliano Zanchi and Giuseppe Frangi
Casa Testori
27 November 2021 – 26 February 2022

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Two artists with a long history, deeply marked by the recent pain of their homeland. Gianriccardo Piccoli and Alessandro Verdi are united by their common roots in Bergamo and by the seriousness of an artistic path that has led them to a production of great intensity and originality. 
The exhibition at Casa Testori proposes two paths that intertwine in the various spaces, in a dialogue that sees Piccoli occupy the walls with some series of large drawings made from the time of the pandemic to the present day, and Verdi occupy the centre of the rooms with tables that display his large artist’s books. The dialogue therefore takes place between the intense black and dense shadows of Piccoli’s papers and the pages on which Verdi’s powerful “spot” shapes are imprinted.
The guiding thread of the exhibition is precisely this confrontation under the sign of a common dramatic perception of reality; a perception that has courageously determined their respective recent choices. 
Piccoli has worked in cycles of drawings, often inspired by the images of other artists, as in La stanza di Louise Bourgeois or Il Letto di Van Gogh. He has a neo-romantic vein, marked by a great existential tension that translates into a search for light within sheets marked by the body of darkness. Verdi, on the other hand, with his large books, so dense in form and image, almost like contemporary illuminated manuscripts, accompanies us in a post atomic age meditation.

The exhibition is also intended as a tribute to the two artists at a significant moment in their biographies: Piccoli will be 80 years old on 15 December 2021, while Verdi has just crossed the threshold of 60.

13 ritratti in vetrina
A project by Casa Testori and Collezione Poscio
Curated by Giuseppe Frangi
Casa De Rodis, Domodossola
11 July – 11 October 2020

The exhibition “Umano molto umano” (Human, very human) that Collezione Poscio has proposed at Casa De Rodis for the summer of 2020 is dedicated to the theme of portraits. Curated by Casa Testori, the exhibition was inspired by a topical fact: in the dramatic months marked by the Coronavirus epidemic, we were all profoundly affected by the faces of those who were on the front line in hospitals and intensive care units. The photographic “portraits” of nurses and doctors have put before us faces of a human intensity that is hard to forget. They are images that re-propose the sense of making a “portrait”: which is not simply the restitution of a person’s features, but the exploration and unveiling of a human condition.
This is an awareness that artists have always had and that the exhibition aims to rediscover through the presentation of 13 great portraits from the beginning of the 20th century to the present day. The title of the exhibition, “Umano molto umano”, is intended to underline this aspect that gives full value and meaning to the portrait genre.
In order to meet the rules and restrictions imposed by the post-pandemic, the exhibition developed like a theatre programme: the portraits appeared in sequence behind the large window of Casa De Rodis for 13 weeks. Every Saturday there was the ritual “appearance” of a new face, according to a precise calendar: visitors and passers-by were invited to explore and deepen the single portrait thanks to a text on a panel that, in addition to historical data, offered an in-depth reading of the work. The exhibition was fully an exhibition “on the square”: in fact, thanks to an evocative display solution, the 13 portraits – from 11 July to 11 October – looked out, naturally in reproduction, from the windows of Casa De Rodis, and thus onto the central Piazza Mercato in Domodossola.
Throughout the week, there was a succession of important works such as Umberto Boccioni‘s Ritratto della madre from the Ricci Oddi Gallery in Piacenza and the Ritratto di Mario Alicata, one of Renato Guttuso‘s masterpieces. 
Opening the exhibition was a painting made for the occasion by Barbara Nahmad: the Ritratto di un ritratto featuring Monica Falocchi, head nurse of the ICU at the Spedali di Brescia. Monica Falocchi is one of the symbolic faces that marked the months of the epidemic: in fact, her face, photographed by Andrea Frazzetta, went on the cover of the New York Times Magazine.

EXHIBITION CALENDAR

11 – 17 July: Barbara Nahmad, Ritratto di un ritratto (COVID-19, Brescia), 2020
18 – 24 July: Ottone Rosai, Ritratto di Ottavio Fanfani, 1946
25 – 31 July: Beppe Devalle, Ritratto di Jo, 2010 
1 – 7 August: Giovanni Testori, Ritratto di donna, 1977 
8 – 14 August: Filippo De Pisis, Garçon de Boulevards, 1928
15 – 21 August: Carlo Fornara, Ritratto della sorella Marietta davanti alla chiesa del lazzaretto a Prestinone, 1896
22 – 28 August: Aldo Mondino, Ritratto, 1987
29 August – 4 September: Giosetta Fioroni, Liberty in gabbia, 1969 
5 – 11 September: Mario Schifano, Ritratto di Boccioni, 1985 
12 – 18 September: Renato Guttuso, Ritratto di Mario Alicata, 1940
19 – 25 September: Gianfranco Ferroni, Autoritratto, 1946
26 September – 2 October: Matteo Fato, Ritratto di Charles Duke (Moon1972), 2019 
3 – 11 October: Umberto Boccioni, Ritratto della madre, 1911/12

COLLATERAL EVENTS

MY PORTRAITS IN THE FRONT LINE
Unione Montana delle Valli dell’Ossola, Domodossola
25 September 2020

Meeting with photographer Andrea Frazzetta (winner of the 2020 Ischia International Prize for Journalism) with the participation of Monica Falocchi, head nurse of the ICU of the Spedali Civili Hospital in Brescia (cover face of “New York Time Magazine“) and artist Barbara Nahmad and moderated by Giuseppe Frangi.

VIRTUAL FINISSAGE
16 October 2020

At the end of the exhibition, a free-access meeting was held (via Zoom) with the participation of Giuseppe Frangi, vice-president of Casa Testori, Stella Poscio, president of Casa de Rodis, and Massimo Ferrari, president of Galleria Ricci Oddi in Piacenza, the museum that owns Umberto Boccioni’s Ritratto della madre, which closed the exhibition calendar.

Barbara Nahmad

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Ottone Rosai

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Jo (Jolanda Devalle) 2010 Olio e Acrilico su tela 120x100

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Testori

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De Pisis

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Fioroni

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Schifano

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(KEEP THE FIRE BURNING. SURPRISES OF CONTEMPORARY ART)
A project by Casa Testori
Curated by Davide Dall’Ombra, Luca Fiore, Giuseppe Frangi and Francesca Radaelli
Meeting di Rimini
20-26 August 2015

ONLY ONE TIME: THE PRESENT 
Giuseppe Frangi

Let us begin with a statistic: never in the history of man has there been so much artistic production as there has in our own days. Never have there been so many artists, not just in terms of absolute quantity – this would be logical given that there are now seven billion of us on the earth – but also in terms of the percentage of people who have chosen art as their way of life. Why do we want and need art so much? And why should this happen in times like ours, when utilitarian logic always seems to have the upper hand? These are questions that might be answered as Gio Ponti answered them, with a charming anecdote. He imagined that God, at the end of time, received men one by one, and was pleased with the work that he – God – had done and with what he had created. But when, after an innumerable stream of professions, an artist came forward, God was nonplussed. The idea that men might become artists was something he had not foreseen. Instead of being annoyed, though, he was all the more pleased with those of his creatures who had surprised their own creator, by doing something that not even He had bargained for. What does this anecdote suggest? That art is the activity which makes man get outside himself, it is the space of the unexpected, of the unnecessary, of the gratuitous. It is the place where the desire that moves man in every moment of his life struggles to reach an objective form, or to express itself in words.
It has always been like this, from the time of the Lascaux rock carvings till our own days. Just as there is no time without art, neither is there any code that ensures the goodness of this art. In the words of Damien Hirst, one of the phenomena of contemporary art, a person who inspires both scandal and front covers: «Great art is when you understand something you didn’t already understand about what it means to be alive». 
One thing that is certain is that art can never be equal to itself, it must always accept the risk of the new, of what has not been said before. Even at the cost of failure, of coming right off the rails of its own nature. 
Art has another characteristic: it knows only one time, and that is the present time. This is always true, in the sense that even when we look at a great work of the past, it is not great by decree, it is great because it makes the strings of our present vibrate when we look at it with a gaze that belongs to no other time in history. And the present of art is not only ideal, interior, subjective, it is also objective. The Artist Is Present is the title of an extraordinary performance that excited hundreds and hundreds of visitors to the MoMa of New York in 2010. Marina Abramović, the artist, remained seated throughout at a table, relating by looks only, with the visitors who, one by one, sat down opposite her: 1,565 people for a total of 700 hours of performance. An extremely intense experience, humanly and emotionally, in which the artist, by delivering herself up to the other person’s gaze, in a certain sense “giving” herself, touches something that had to do with both her own destiny and that of the person in front of her. 
It is difficult for the artist today to live in the shadows, because the media systems are often an integral part of his or her action. Artists are people who are often called upon to reveal everything about themselves, to render naked their own lives, as did Tracey Emin, an exponent of Young British Art, with a work that had great media impact and was disconcerting to the spectator; none other than her own unmade bed, after her body had “lived” in it for four days, dominated by an instinct for death. When she got out of it, she saw in that form, which related the potential undoing of life, a powerful image, a sculpted form of life itself, of her life. We might well wonder how men of the next century will look at that bed, what they will see in it. But the idea that an artist’s goal is to conquer time is not only somewhat vainglorious, it is also the child of an aca- demic rhetoric that contemporary art is to be thanked for having swept away. 
Art is a tool for unplanned relations with men of its own time. It is a language that succeeds in touching deep chords, in unforeseeable ways and times. When Ai Weiwei, from his studio in China, conceived the installation for the now disused prison of Alcatraz, he created a work that proved to be a gesture of reparation, highly poetic and therefore very human. His filling the prison washbasins, bathtubs and even lavatories with delicate flowers in white ceramic had the effect of a homage to everything human that had been profoundly humiliated there. When Ron Mueck, the extraordinarily skillful Australian sculptor, rendered monumental the figures of two elderly bathers, the effect was deeply unsettling because it invested with emotion and passion a situation that was aesthetically unattractive, and because it restored the eternal theme of the body to its central role in the creation of art. This is the theme that the British artist Jenny Saville has obsessively and explosively explored over the years. She has poured masses of astounding physicality onto her canvases. After undergoing the experience of maternity, she succeeded in gathering this energy into the narration of a relationship: that between her body and the bodies of her children. 
The body also enters the field, metaphorically, in the powerful installation by Anish Kapoor, an Indian artist naturalized British. In Shooting into the Corner (2008-2009), a cannon fires balls of blood-red wax, a quasi-organic material, into a corner of the room, with implacable rhythm and with mindless, calculated violence. The effect is striking without being in any way theatrical. Another type of violence is offered by Alberto Garutti: a luminous violence, one that dazzles the spectator in order to trigger off a dimension of wonder. The 200 lamps that light every time a thunderbolt falls in Italian territory are an invitation to open a breach in our excessively urbanized, calculating minds. 
Damien Hirst, Marina Abramović, Ai Weiwei, Ron Mueck, Jenny Saville, Anish Kapoor and Alberto Garutti are brought together here to offer an alternative view of contemporary art. A view that is curious and open-minded in an attempt not to remain hostage to the usual commonplaces. Today’s art is certainly anomalous in the market values it has attained – to such an extent that one of the greatest and most serious of present-day artists, Gerhard Richter, has publicly declared himself embarrassed by the quotations achieved by his works. Art is also often reduced to an idiotic exercise in nihilism. But in the midst of all this mire – as always in human history – “threads of gold” are to be found that it is a pity not to follow, observe and know. 
These “threads of gold” relate an unexpected, sometimes unsettling, sympathy for all that is human. And they relate it in equally unexpected forms, often very different from those to which tradition has accustomed us. But art is not obliged to respect any particular form. Indeed, it is in its very nature to break away from forms, even those of the very recent past, and venture into new terrain. This is its response to the stimuli arriving from the novelties introduced by human life itself. «Art is an open door towards possibilities», in the words of one of today’s major curators, Hans Ulrich Obrist, in his discussion of the artist Leon Golub. 
«I have always been interested as an artist in how one can somehow look again for that very first moment of creativity where everything is possible and nothing has actually happened. The vacuum is that moment of time before creation when anything is possible», stated Anish Kapoor in an interview, pressed by numerous questions on his concave and convex forms and on his works in red wax that “create themselves”. 
This exhibition aims to follow some of these «threads of gold», not through the works, but by narrating the works, even in the form of a spectacle. The choice is not intended to induce consensus, but to arouse curiosity. It present instances of extreme boldness, which are worth coming to terms with. Boldness of language, or a boldness of approach that leads the artist to penetrate the fibres of reality far more than we can. At times this boldness may be induced by the means available to the artist. This was the case with the great British artist David Hockney; with the arrival of the iPad, he realized he would have to venture into painting on the tablet, that this was a stimulus that would produce surprising results. And indeed, the beauty of his “artificial” images, produced with electronic brushes, testifies to a view that has become more acute, more excitable, which penetrates further into reality. And this is how the artist David Hockney – but we can say the same of all the other artists present here – is still continuing today to amaze God. 

THE EXHIBITION

A curious and open look to avoid being hostage to the usual clichés. Today’s art is certainly also a matter of the market, often reduced to a pure exercise in nihilism. But in the midst of this mud – as always in the history of mankind – one can discover golden threads that it is a pity not to follow. They are golden threads that tell of an unexpected, sometimes disconcerting, emotion for the human being. And they tell it in equally unexpected forms, sometimes very different from those to which tradition has accustomed us. But art is not constrained by any form. The exhibition follows some of these “golden threads” through the narrative, even spectacular, of these works. The spectator was greeted by a video that introduced, not without irony, the theme of today’s art, outlining some of the characteristics that differentiate it from that of past centuries.

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Casa Testori
18 June 2008

The Associazione Giovanni Testori organised an afternoon of celebrations in the garden of Casa Testori to celebrate the dedication of a rose to Giovanni Testori by the large German flower company Kordes.

The image of the rose, in fact, was one of the most recurrent in Testori’s production: a subject often represented in his paintings and present in many of his poems.
To celebrate the event, a few artists particularly close to Testori were invited: Hermann Albert, Enzo Cucchi, Rainer Fetting, Klaus Mehrkens, Giovanni Frangi and Alessandro Verdi. These artists paid homage to the critic by creating some works on the theme, exhibited in the large hall of the house together with some of Testori’s drawings. 
During the afternoon, the actors Anna Nogara and Andrea Carbelli celebrated Testori by reciting, from the balcony of his room, some of his most beautiful pieces dedicated to the rose.

A project by Casa Tesori
Curated by Davide Dall’Ombra, Luca Fiore, Giuseppe Frangi and Francesca Radaelli
Meeting of Rimini
18-24 August 2019

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AND A THIRD: ART IN THE MAKING
Davide Dall’Ombra

This exhibition completes a trio of exhibition projects that Casa Testori has curated for the Meeting of Rimini, with the aim of bringing the public closer to Contemporary Art. The goal has been to share the beauty and the necessity of today’s artistic expression with the widest range of people of all ages and origins. Compared with art of the past, Contemporary Art probably calls for a greater openness on the part of the visitor and requires honest access keys, which the curator has the duty to provide. There is no doubt that our first two exhibitions proved able to offer the public important opportunities to get to know their own present, often due to an unexpected empathy of desire. 
2015 saw the opening of an event that related the work of a number of living masters, probably the most celebrated, discussed and highly paid on the international scene today. The exhibition ranged from Damien Hirst’s shark to Anish Kapoor’s waxes and Marina Abramovic performance at the MoMA of New York. The exhibition, Tenere vivo il fuoco. Sorprese dell’arte contemporanea [Keeping the Fires Burning: Surprises of Contemporary Art], disconcerted visitors with video images designed to document unexpected languages. The lymph of the exhibition was provided by a wide-ranging and detailed introductory video, for which Giacomo Poretti generously provided the speaking voice. Poretti, as part of the Aldo, Giacomo and Giovanni trio, appeared in the celebrated Garpez scene in Tre uomini e una gamba [Three Men and a Leg] (1997), shown at the beginning of the video. There was no fixed itinerary and there were no instructions for use. It was up to the visitor to choose what and how much to see, of the things narrated, but guides and curators were available, 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, to answer any questions about the artists, works and processes of Contemporary Art. There was a deluge of questions, incessant, interested, obstinate, curious and often with evident personal implications. Something had happened and a curtain had clearly been torn. 
Two years later, with a new introductory video, a new choice of today’s artists measured themselves against a precise subject, one that in some ways spelt out the theme chosen for that year’s Meeting: Quello che tu erediti dai tuoi padri, riguadagnatelo, per possederlo [What you inherit from your father must first be earned before it’s yours]. The relationship between Contemporary Art and the masters of the past, a cardinal theme in every age, was presented, not by simple narration but, at long last, through real works. Il passaggio di Enea. Artisti di oggi alle prese con il passato [Aeneas Passes On. Artists of today one-to-one with the past] (2017), staged a probably unrepeatable collection of painting, sculpture, installations, video and photography. After viewing Julia Krahn’s work, dedicated to her relationship with her own mother, the visitor was called to take stock of two 20th century masters in close dialogue with their “fathers”, a Last Supper by Andy Warhol, derived from Leonardo’s Cenacolo, and Michelangelo Antonioni’s last film, dedicated to Michelangelo’s Moses. The imposing hand bearing a lantern by Gianni Dessì lent a monumental air to the stairway at the center of the piazza. The six rooms around it hosted the vast cycle dedicated to I Promessi Sposi cancellati [Manzoni’s The Betrothed Erased] by Emilio Isgrò, the Madonna at body temperature by Alberto Garutti, a cycle of seashores by Giovanni Frangi, the Via Crucis realized by Adrian Paci, the cycle dedicated to Wim Wenders and 11 September loaned by Villa Panza and the imposing procession of souls on wax paper, drawn by Andrea Mastrovito. The impression that the wager had been won derived not given merely from the numbers, which matched and exceeded the 22,000 in a week registered at the first exhibition. Visitors grasped perfectly the extraordinary potential of art to illuminate a fundamental theme such as our relationship with tradition and with those who generated it historically and socially, as in the most intimate family relationships. Thirty years on from the glorious period in which the Meeting of Rimini, thanks to Giuseppe Panza di Biumo and Giovanni Testori, had succeeded in displaying works by artists of the calibre of Richard Long, Luigi Ghirri, Graham Sutherland, Francis Bacon, Henry Moore, James Turrell, Robert Irwin, Carl Andre and Renato Guttuso, Contemporary Art had returned to the Rimini Trade Fair in all its greatness and “demanded” to stay. 
When the time came to plan a third appointment at the Meeting of Rimini, the ice had been broken and the relationship between contemporary and earlier art had been experimented without mediation. It seemed no longer feasible, therefore, to follow the same path with a simple exchange of horses, presenting a new selection of works and artists, maybe around a new theme. A step was needed that would be worthy of the experimental approach to knowledge that an event such as this permits and, in a certain sense, demands. Thus was born the idea of allowing the public a final plunge into Contemporary Art, exploiting its primary feature, that of being born NOW. Visitors to the 2019 exhibition, NOW NOW. Quando nasce un’opera d’arte[Art in the Making], can see seven artists at work, intent on creating a work characterized by a final composition, at the end of the week, and by intermediate stages, visible day by day. This is not a simple Studio Visit – a habitual practice among curators in which artists are seen presenting their works, where they created them, to interested critics. Rather, the common visitor is allowed to enter the creative process. The aim is to focus attention on the generative components of the work, on the elements and energies the artists bring into play, themselves and their inspiration. But it also aims to focus on the materials used to plan and create the work, on the time factor and on the way the artists manage their daily life. Awareness of this process is not only a way of obliging spectators to go beyond prejudices of the “I did this too” type. It also enables them to grasp the exciting and dramatic aspects underlying a work of art, to participate in the creative moment, getting to know the circumstances, the research and the daily events – from frustrations to enthusiasms – that occur to an artist at work. 
Seven young artists, widely differing in their techniques and languages, have transferred their studios to the Trade Fair, appearing as if naked before visitors, ready to receive their stares, but also their questions and comments. So far as we know, this is an experiment that has never been tried before, at least with such numbers and performance intensity. It goes beyond the concept of shared art, overcoming the risk of voyeurism, or the Big Brother effect through a component of interaction that will certainly not be lacking, not only during moments of dialogue, but in the daily conversations to which a specific area is dedicated. 
Thus Elena Canavese has mounted her photographic set from daily objects, because small domestic items are able to speak to us of universal places and images: from the universe in a kitchen to the kitchen in the universe. Danilo Sciorilli places his accent on the sense of existence in relation to its inevitable end. He narrates it with his typical tools of video animation and with the unprecedented transformation of certain serious games of our childhood. Alberto Gianfreda presents his sculptures in ceramic that has been fragmented and recomposed to become mutable and in movement. He now adds the metaphorical struggle of the animal kingdom to the human history that has always animated his work. It is Elisa Muliere who brings painting back into the exhibition. Her informal and poetic energy is intent on transposing notes of obsessive contemporary music into colours and forms. Alberto Montorfano makes use of graphite drawing to set down a continual superimposition of faces, taken from direct photo shots. This record of the flow of “people” at the Rimini Meeting raises questions over multiple image and identity. bn+ brinanovara (aka Giorgio Brina and Simone Novara) relate, using foam rubber maps, textile and white Carrara marble set out day by day behind a couple of melting glass idols, the plausible story of an iceberg reaching the latitude of Rimini. It demonstrates to the spectator the difficulty of achieving simplicity. Video language could not be omitted from the exhibition. It is provided by Stefano Cozzi, who has created an artistic short film of the event itself, documenting it in a video that will grow day by day, from the arrival of the artists to the conclusion of their works.
As two years ago, the exhibition could not be without a “father” of these young artists at work and the visitors called to take part in the choral-style performance. Placed at the center of the exhibition and introduced by a video relating its genesis, is La Chimera, probably the greatest painting ever made by the artist Mario Schifano (1934-1998). It is present here because it is an extraordinary example of a work created before the public, a gathering of more than six thousand people, during that unrepeatable night of 1985. […] 
The theme of the creative process, of “Art in the Making”, naturally brings to mind an infinite number of problems and considerations concerning artistic inspiration, or the relationship between this inspiration and the creative act itself, and reality as lived or perceived by the artist. What is at stake is the individual’s need to perform an artistic act, to use expressive means and communicative contexts to convey “the idea”. But this introduction to an exhibition that does not claim to be exemplificative, let alone exhaustive, is hardly the place in which to address a matter so essential, yet elusive, as the artistic event. It will be sufficient to concentrate on this NOW NOW of art as life: before, during and after the exhibition. 

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A project by MilanoCard and Casa Testori
Curated by Giuseppe Frangi
Cripta San Sepolcro, Milan
11 May – 15 September 2018

After the great success of the Bill Viola exhibition, it is now the turn of Michelangelo Antonioni (1912-2007), one of the greatest directors in the history of cinema, to be the protagonist of an extraordinary exhibition at the Cripta San Sepolcro (Crypt of the Holy Sepulchre) in Milan. 
From 11 May to 15 September 2018, the rooms of one of the city’s most spiritually rich and visited places, which since its reopening has seen over 70,000 people pass through it in just under two years, hosted Lo sguardo di Michelangelo (The Gaze of Michelangelo), a 15-minute short film produced by Istituto Luce and Lottomatica. The film, made by the Ferrarese director in 2004, three years before his death, can be considered a sort of spiritual testament.

The initiative, curated by Giuseppe Frangi, produced by MilanoCard and Casa Testori, promoted by the Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana, with the patronage of the Associazione Michelangelo Antonioni and the sponsorship of Analysis, recounts the extraordinary experience of the encounter between the director and Michelangelo Buonarroti’s Moses, preserved in the Basilica of San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome. 
The gaze referred to in the title is that of the director, who enters walking in the half-light of the church, stops and remains motionless, almost overwhelmed, in front of Buonarroti’s masterpiece, scrutinising its details and dwelling on the prophet’s expression. 
Moses is a marble statue that “speaks”, capable of transmitting to the observer all the beauty that the artist has given him. In this visit, Antonioni enters into complete symbiosis with the sculpture, delicately moving his arm until he touches it with his hand to capture its spirit. 
The director’s exit through the church door, accompanied by a mysterious chorus of Pierluigi da Palestrina, makes the documentary author return to the sunlight penetrating from outside. 
An extraordinary experience that made the visitor feel like a protagonist, finding himself in contact with a millenary work such as the Crypt, in the total silence from which the comparison between human transience and the eternity of art springs.

The exhibition was enriched by some photographic portraits of Moses made by Aurelio Amendola, in dialogue with Antonioni’s work.