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.

IMG_2798

IMG_2803

IMG_2672

IMG_2674

IMG_2676

IMG_2678

IMG_2684

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.

_MG_6837

_MG_6825

_MG_6828

_MG_6826

_MG_6827

_MG_6830

_MG_6832

_MG_6833

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.

Go to the bookshop

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. 

_L9A1618x

pagine22-23

pagina 26

_L9A1538x

pagine 28-29

_L9A1042

_L9A1355x

_L9A1365x

pagina 57

_L9A1109

pagine68-69

_L9A1159x

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. 

Vai al bookshop

DSC00058

Gamba 11 Luglio 2019 0022

IMG_5307

IMG_5310

DSC00008

DSC00010

DSC00012

DSC00016

DSC00029

DSC00031

DSC00034

DSC00035

DSC00045

DSC00060

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.

_DSC8113

_DSC8116

_DSC8122

_DSC8123

_DSC8127

_DSC8132

_DSC8136

_DSC8139

_DSC8141

_DSC8115

_DSC8131

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.

Go to the bookshop

Curated by Davide Dall’Ombra and Francesco Gesti
Casa Testori
11 October 2015 – 14 February 2016

A GOLDSMITH OF OUR TIME
Giovanni Testori
Como, March 1983

I think all those who have seen an exhibition of William Congdon’s work will have been struck by – and then reflected upon – an overall truth which forms a sort of basso continuo, a background hum, to that great master’s entire career. It is the perfect basic truth, in that it is – or should be – the basic truth for each and every man: from the artist’s work emerges the luminous and tenebrous fact that he, William Congdon, may have been an American citizen, someone born in America, but is in fact a citizen of the world. His history unfolded not in one city, one nation or only one culture; its life blood – the energy feeding it, the destiny forming it – came from visiting, knowing, loving and, I would say, enfolding and embracing a number of cities, nations and cultures. An encounter with a nation, a culture, a city, a town, the curve of a bay, a particular stretch of sea or the gentle expanses of the plains of Lombardy – each of these marked a definitive Assumption and a definitive Fall; the painter was caught up within the truth of these various sites, these various cultures, towns, stretches of sea or expanses of landscape. Not that Congdon changes; he remains himself, naturally, as he continues on his adventure. But I would say that his destiny was to embrace, to be embraced and consumed by, the reality he was driven to encounter by his thirst, his need, to know other cities, nations, cultures and towns (that is, to know creation, to know the earth). It is a relationship that is almost eucharistic – and, one might say, slightly cannibalistic. 
And thus he left New York to proceed through a sequence of images that are unparalleled in the history of modern painting. Some painters have given us images of fragments of the world that may be surprising, memorable, pathetic, glorious or dramatic. But no painter has given us such a concatenation – what I would call an epic poem – in which the most various cities of the world are sung by a bard who is made triumphant by the very fact of his defeat. 

Read full text

_MG_5623

_MG_5624

_MG_5625

_MG_5631

_MG_5629

_MG_5635

_MG_5649

_MG_5650

_MG_5656-2

_MG_5663

_MG_5621

_MG_5667

_MG_5668

THE EXHIBITION

“Pianura” is the exhibition that Casa Testori dedicated in 2016 to the painter William Congdon (1912-1998): an international Action Painting artist loved by Giovanni Testori who, from the New York of his friends Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, after travelling all over the world, decided to settle down in the south of Milan and dedicate his last production to the intimate portrait of cultivated fields, rice paddies and fruits of the Lombard land.
The exhibition, organised in collaboration with The William Congdon Foundation, aimed to explore the American master’s twenty years in Lombardy. The approximately 50 paintings and 20 pastels selected described a parabola of increasingly intimate and profound knowledge of the south-west of Milan, which constitutes the high point of his career.
The thematic rooms presented the various cores around which his production is articulated: the issues addressed alongside the action painters re-emerged in a new key, the result of an observation that was only apparently sedentary. 
After the New Yorks of the 1940s, the Sahara and Santorini of the 1950s, the research turned from spatial to temporal. The protagonists become the power of the earth, its transformations and the inexhaustible mutability of the seasonal cycle, crops and atmospheric phenomena. This is how the fields are called by name and the passage of time is fixed with the spatula between the long furrows of the oil painting.
Reconstructed for the occasion, a sort of imaginative picture gallery immersed the visitor in nocturnal visions of the colour of the fertile fields, in an intimate, lyrical, if not mystical and symbolist relationship with the earth, barley, soya, maize, wisteria and violets.
These were not idyllic visions, however, because Congdon’s gaze led him to disrupt the horizon over the fields, which changed from a linear arrangement still reminiscent of cities to a shifting of planes, almost as if to follow the telluric transformations of origin. A torment, also of a material nature, which is resolved and finds peace in the extraordinary Nebbie (Fogs), which opens the way to the monochromes, introducing a profound transformation in the perception and representation of space, of the relationship between its structural elements (sky, earth and horizon) from an increasingly less naturalistic perspective.
Thus, the meditations on the work of Braque and De Staël re-emerged, but above all, the comparisons and pictorial dialogues woven in direct contact with the New York School of Betty Parson and Peggy Guggenheim, which brought Congdon’s works to the most important museums in New York and to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice.

Go to the bookshop

A project by Casa Testori
Meeting of Rimini
20-25 August 2021

1036_PRTO2021

0224_SAFI2021

0245_SAFI2021

0247_SAFI2021

0249_SAFI2021

0250_SAFI2021

0251_SAFI2021

0252_SAFI2021

1037_PRTO2021

1047_PRTO2021

From 20 to 25 August 2021, at the Meeting of Rimini, Casa Testori presented Io, Pier Paolo Pasolini, an exhibition dedicated to one of the Italian intellectuals whose extraordinary personality – director, screenwriter, actor, poet, writer, playwright – marked the 20th century.

Why Pasolini today? Because Pasolini is an open chapter in our history. He is an intellectual whose writing, thinking, filming and debating have always been marked by a deep wound.
You might think it was a personal wound. In reality, if Pasolini is still such a living, burning word, even after almost 50 years, it is because, by destiny, he bore the burden of a collective wound, he was the wounded witness of an anthropological change, of a change that primarily affected his identity and his person. And which has the dramatic mark of a “lack”. Pasolini was able to push through the nostalgia for what was lost, putting into action an intelligence capable of unmasking, without fear of scandal, all the hypocrisies of the new victorious world.
Pasolini’s strength therefore lies in this coincidence between the personal and public levels. This is why his words, even though they stem from his experience as an intellectual without a country, still weigh on collective history.

The exhibition Io, Pier Paolo Pasolini reconnects these two levels, using above all direct contact: it was Pasolini’s face and voice, so sharp and lucidly painful, that told his story, in six large video projections and in a collective and uninterrupted performance of readings of his texts, entrusted to several voices called upon to bring his words “alive”.
An exhibition not to talk about Pasolini, but to hear Pasolini speak.

PASOLINI LIVE
A Pasolinian performance

The six-act exhibition was opened by the performance Pasolini LIVE, which reached an international audience via the web. From a control booth at the beginning of the exhibition, a continuous Pasolinian live broadcast was transmitted: an uninterrupted reading for over ten hours a day of books and collections by Pasolini (articles, poems, speeches) to which groups of actors, artists and curators gave voice, as well as visitors to the exhibition and volunteers from the Fair, who were asked to read a passage by Pier Paolo Pasolini.
At certain set times of the day, the diffusion of Pasolini’s words was achieved through the integral reading of some books and collections of articles, entrusted to young Italian actors, who took turns in an ideal chain throughout the days, creating physiological appointments for the international audience that was connected.
But that’s not all. The flow of more than 50 hours of performances, for 6 consecutive days, was enriched by special guests. Passionate readers, men and women of culture, poets and journalists, musicians and singers, doctors and scientists of every sensibility and category were involved, who intervened from the exhibition and from all over the world with their own voices, reading a passage by Pier Paolo Pasolini dear to them.
A palimpsest organised for a continuous flow and a global homage never attempted for a writer, able to account for the tangible international interest aroused by the intellectual from Casarsa.

PASOLINI IN 6 ACTS

The central element of the exhibition are six large video projections, conceived as six chapters in which to recount as many facets, creative and biographical episodes of Pasolini’s life.

“È difficile dire con parole di figlio”
The origins and the mother
Telling about Pasolini’s main affection, his relationship with his mother, is the key to introducing the character, his Friulian origins, his move to Rome and his education. Right from the start we heard Pasolini’s voice, talking about himself and reading one of his poignant poems dedicated to his mother.

“Il patrimonio della poesia popolare anonima”
History and the City of Man
Pasolini’s concern for Italy’s artistic heritage, for its integrity, but also the defence of its centrality in the formation of our consciences, stems from his artistic interest, developed in his work as a painter and draughtsman, and ignited during his university years in Bologna, thanks to his professor, the great critic Roberto Longhi.

“Manca sempre qualcosa”
Pasolini’s religiousness and the Vangelo secondo Matteo
A pivotal theme in understanding Pasolini’s complexity is his relationship with faith, or rather with Christ. His Vangelo secondo Matteo was judged by L’Osservatore Romano to be the best film ever made on the figure of Jesus. Some of the film’s key characters were presented in a special immersive projection that pays homage to the famous work by his friend Fabio Mauri, who involved Pasolini himself in a performance.

“Il modo di essere uomini”
True fascism is homologation
Following Pasolini’s eyes and mind as they move over the landscape, over the city, through its history, opens the viewer’s mind to the anthropological, historical, architectural and social levels of the city and its profoundly human expression. Pasolini’s is a cry of alarm, against those who threaten man and society, corroding it from within, it is the prophetic and loving denunciation that made his words indispensable.

“Non si può scindere l’amare dal capire”
The awakening of the people and Gennariello
“He who prostrates himself with all his strength, even sentimental strength, against regression and degradation, means that he loves those men in the flesh. Love that I have the misfortune to feel, and that I hope to communicate to you too”. With short clips of interviews and excerpts, Pasolini’s educational power was evoked, through the famous articles collected in Scritti corsari and Lettere luterane, which open with the emblematic pedagogical treatise Gennariello, against homologation, for the freedom of man. 

“Distruggere e annientare quella solitudine”
The farewell of Giovanni Testori
“Thus, those who have truly and totally wanted life may sooner than others find themselves in the very hands of death, which will make them a laughing stock. Unless pain teaches the “via crucis” of patience. But is this something that our time allows?” The finale is Testori’s writing for Pasolini’s death (Espresso, 1975): a unique consonance that opens us to the modernity and topicality of Pasolini’s research.

A project by Casa Testori
Curated by Davide Dall’Ombra
For Italian Council – Sixth Edition

DE-ANIMATING: A ZOMBIE INDEX OF FORGETTING
Leora Maltz-Leca 

What does forgetting look like? How do you paint the ebbing of memory, or filmically convey the slippage – or willful erasure – of yesterday’s truths by the onslaught of the present? How might one visually articulate the withdrawal of history, or even better: actually seize the tail end of the past as the tide drags it away? For Italian artist Andrea Mastrovito, one possibility lies in the ghostly pallor of white paint, a seeping, creeping fluid that leaks under doors, and rushes across film, obliterating, erasing, effacing. In I Am Not Legend, the second of an ambitious trilogy that premiered in NYC with NYsferatu in 2017, he whites out the undead figures of George Romero’s 1968 horror film, Night of the Living Dead, in turn based on Richard Matheson’s 1954 post-apocalyptic novel, I am Legend, which provides the title, reversed, for Mastrovito’s 2020 rendition. To produce I Am Not Legend, the artist employed an incredibly labor-intensive process of printing, and then hand painting, scanning and refilming nearly a hundred thousand stills to reconstitute an eighty-minute animation of Romero’s classic. His exacting process creates a layered metaphorics of blankness, a draining of mind from matter from that further transforms a human into a thing to insinuate his method of animation as a de-animation. Here the process of animation works against itself, or, like the title, in reverse: for if animation traditionally promised to transform puppets into people through a technological-magical sleight of hand that reproduces the vivid appearance of life, I Am Not Legend instead ponders the transformation of people into puppets through a distinctly disenchanted relationship with technology. 

Continued in the catalog

_MG_1993 copy

_MG_1881 copy

_MG_1903 copy

_MG_1913 copy

_MG_1921 copy

_MG_1946 copy

_MG_1965 copy

_MG_1974 copy

_MG_1979 copy

THE ARTWORK

I Am Not Legend is a 1h12′ film by Andrea Mastrovito. The work was made by printing in A4 size all the frames of Night of the Living Dead (1968) by George Romero and intervening on each sheet with white paint in order to erase the presence of zombies from the original film. Once more than 100,000 plates were obtained, they were then digitized and reassembled following the new script created by the artist who used thousands of quotations taken from a hundred famous films, novels and songs. To complete the work, the original soundtrack is by Matthew Nolan and Stephen Shannon, with the contribution for the opening and closing music by Maurizio Guarini, author, together with the Goblin, of the original music for the films Profondo Rosso (1975), Suspiria (1977) and Dawn of the Living Dead (1978).

THE EXHIBITION

Io Non Sono Leggenda
Palazzo Fabroni, Pistoia
September 26, 2020 – May 9, 2021

The solo exhibition Io Non Sono Leggenda aims to contextualize, at Palazzo Fabroni, the launch of the film within a path that can reflect the research that Andrea Mastrovito has conducted in recent years around the figure of the anti-hero. The exhibition occupies all the rooms of the museum used for temporary exhibitions, to retrace not only the genesis of the work donated to the museum – original plates, sources of inspiration and creative process – but also some of the most significant steps of the artist’s recent years: from the previous film, NYsferatu, completely entrusted to the technique of drawing; to the inlays, allegorical works that had great success in Lyon on the occasion of the Biennale; to the stained glass windows, drawings on colored compositions of rulers, up to the cut-out books and collages.

THE TOUR

The artwork involved the creation of a single copy, destined for Palazzo Fabroni, as well as an exhibition copy used for the world tour in various museum venues and international cultural centers.
After the screening of the work’s trailer in Lyon, on August 15, 2020 I Am Not Legend was premiered in New York at Magazzino Italian Art in Cold Spring.
On September 25, 2020, the official premiere was held in Pistoia, on the opening of the exhibition Io Non Sono Leggenda. After that, the work circulated internationally, screened at MUDAM in Luxembourg,Belvedere 21 in Vienna, the Italian Cultural Institutes in Toronto, New York and Pretoria, and the Laznia Center in Gdansk.

THE BOOK

On the occasion of the exhibition, a bilingual volume entirely dedicated to the work I Am Not Legend has been produced. Designed by the artist Maria Tassi, the book retraces the narrative flow of the film through the figurative key of the photo-story. With essays by Leora Maltz-Leca, Stefano Leonforte, Stefano Raimondiand a presentation of the works in the exhibition by curator Davide Dall’Ombra. 
Go to the bookshop

Project realized thanks to the support of the Italian Council (Sixth Edition, 2019), a program for the promotion of Italian contemporary art in the world of the Direzione Generale Creatività Contemporanea per i Beni e le Attività Culturali e per il Turismo.

Casa Testori
26 June – 31 October 2021

“Curatela” (Curatorship) is the summer exhibition of Casa Testori curated by Davide Dall’Ombra. “Curatela” launches the “(Ri)cambio la visita” project, supported by Fondazione di Comunità Milano, with the patronage of Consiglio Regionale della Lombardia. 
This exhibition offers a cultural reactivation of proximity that, in 2022, will see the city of Milan at the center of an artistic flow between the center and the suburbs, between Museums and Libraries, between schools and artists’ studios.

The exhibition path at Casa Testori presents three young artists with their unpublished, specifically designed to narrate their artistic research. 
These works by Alberto Gianfreda, Fabio Roncato and the artistic duo bn+BRINANOVARA are inspired by three great artworks of the twentieth century, signed by Ennio Morlotti, Giorgio Morandi and Filippo de Pisis, from three major museums in Milan: Museo del Novecento, Casa Boschi di Stefano and Villa Necchi Campiglio. These paintings will be exhibited in three Municipal Libraries in the Milan suburbs next year. These are crucial artists of the 1900s that will allow us to recount three different sides of Giovanni Testori: poetry, militant criticism and the newspaper article.

In the contemporary debate on the role of the critic and the curator, this exhibition will illustrate different approaches in the relationship with the artist adopted to give space and word to his work, questioning how to expose and/or tell it but also, sometimes, collaborating to the definition of the artistic process that generates it. 
This is how the thread between the six artists is woven, the CURATELA (curatorship) precisely, squaring the means of the past and present, capable of triggering a process of growth and understanding of the work of art that benefits the artist and the public. 
Testori played the role of the critic who accompanies with his own words the whole life and work of an artist like Morlotti, on whom he wrote numerous times for over fifty years, he was able to intervene with poetry on the “other” work of Morandi and use his torrential production on the “Corriere della Sera” to re-establish the importance of an artist like De Pisis.
Casa Testori continues to narrate the contemporary vitality of twentieth-century painting and gives voice to emerging artists, interpreting its curatorial role by accompanying the relationship with its characterized spaces and following the artists step by step in the process.

giorgio_morandi_fiori

ennio_morlotti_collina_di_imbersago

filippo_de_pisis_natura_morta_con_lepre

alberto_gianfreda_italia

alberto_gianfreda_italia_

Gianfreda

Gianfreda

fabio_roncato_landscape_

fabio_roncato_landscape

bn_brinanovara_la_morte_e_trasparente_5

bn_brinanovara_la_morte_e_trasparente_2

IMG_0256

IMG_0285

IMG_0291

IMG_0301

IMG_0351

IMG_0353

IMG_0799

14 artisti valdostani conquistano il Museo Gamba
A project by Casa Testori
Curated by Davide Dall’Ombra
Castello Gamba – Museo d’arte moderna e contemporanea
Châtillon, Valle d’Aosta
23 October 2020 – 2 June 2021

AN OPPORTUNITY TO UNDERSTAND OURSELVES
Cristina De La Pierre

The Castello Gamba di Châtillon – Museo d’arte moderna e contemporanea della Valle d’Aosta, concludes its 2020 exhibition season with ASSALTO AL CASTELLO. 14 artisti valdostani conquistano il Museo Gamba [Assault on the Castle. 14 artists from Valle d’Aosta conquer the Museo Gamba]. The exhibition was organized by the was organized by the Regional Ministry for Cultural Heritage, Tourism, Sports and Commerce of Regione autonoma Valle d’Aosta, in collaboration with Casa Testori, a cultural hub just outside Milano, and curated by Davide Dall’Ombra. 
The modern and contemporary art collection of the Region at the Castello Gamba sets a group of works by contemporary artists, active in Valle d’Aosta, alongside its two core collections: 19th-20th century works dedicated to Alpine landscapes and masterpieces by the leading Italian 20th century masters. A pacific but resolute occupation by artists who accept the challenge of measuring themselves against the important protagonists present in the museum, from Mario Schifano to Felice Casorati, from Renato Guttuso to Lucio Fontana. 
The role of a public museum dedicated to the contemporary includes that of protecting and interpreting the artistic expression of the territory. This does not mean mummifying in a museum artistic expressions that are still evolving, but it does mean taking into account ongoing realities. To give voice to the contemporary art of the Valle d’Aosta is not only a civic duty, it is a unique opportunity to understand and also to understand ourselves. 

ASSAULT ON THE CASTLE
Davide Dall’Ombra

It is often said that certain situations cannot be expressed in words. For artists, though, there is no way out. They are condemned to express themselves, to give voice to elements and feelings of our experience, to help us understand something of ourselves. All the same, if one aspect is common to the sparse number of contemporary art exhibitions in this strange year of 2020, it is the programmatic intention not to hold an exhibition on Covid. Today’s art, for the very fact that it cannot avoid expressing the times in which we live, knows that it can do this only by not placing itself directly at the center. This is not just an understandable revulsion against the “monotheme” of our conversations and concerns during these months. It is an awareness that respecting the particular drama means grasping its universal aspect, and that doing this requires taking a step back which these months do not yet allow. We can speak of this subject today only by eluding it. Rather as the mountains and pastures surrounding this exhibition will be sought in vain in the subjects chosen by these fourteen artists active in Valle d’Aosta. 
This exhibition, in fact, had its origin in the minds of the artists taking part in it during the first lockdown, only to be halted, when barely inaugurated, by the arrival of the second. Its function, therefore, will be to lend its countenance to the new start, to the reiterated, obstinate and indispensable new start. When the first nucleus of artists coagulated around one of them, Marco Bettio, it was not difficult to construct the team and bring it to the attention of the Scientific Curator of Castello Gamba, Viviana Maria Vallet. She, in her turn, identified Casa Testori as the proper interlocutor to curate it. 
Faithful to its origin, the exhibition does not aspire to provide a screening of the artistic production of the Valley or to identify its top-drawer artists, though most of these have probably been drawn into the net. For this reason, we thought of an “assault”. The claims and predicaments of the artists were allowed to speak, their invasion was accepted. We listened, but we also aimed to give free rein to the expressive potential of each artist, inviting them to dialogue with the space. We aimed to go beyond the simple gallery of images and bring about fourteen spatial interventions which would delineate the exhibition itinerary and the permanent collection of the Museum, as well as certain crucial external points. 

064

069

072

158

139

015

019

022

024

031

033

133

040

050

055b

060

061

102

127

122

131

180

162

174

170

173

BETWEEN THE COLLECTION, IN THE EXHIBITION HALLS AND OUTDOORS

This is not a gallery of images, but 14 new spatial interventions spread throughout the exhibition, in the collection and outside: from painting to video, from sculpture to installation.
After opening with Jean-Claude Oberto’s work, which illustrates this persistent context of uncertainty, four interventions mark the rooms of the permanent collection: these are the works by Patrick Passuello (Room 1), Massimo Sacchetti (Room 2), Pasqualino Fracasso (Rooms 4, 5, 7, 11 and 13) and Barbara Tutino(Room 10).
Leaving the rooms of the collection, Marco Jaccond‘s papers accompany us up the stairs to this point and, here on the left, the “consultation room” hosts Andrea Carlotto‘s talk. Behind us, the Castle’s usual exhibition space unfolds, with works by Giuliana Cunéaz and Chicco Margaroli; the mezzanine is presided over by the paintings of Marco Bettio and Sarah Ledda, while Riccardo Mantelli invades the entire roof terrace. 
But the exhibition does not end in front of the extraordinary landscape over the valley. Two artists have also occupied the exterior. In the large fountain is the work of Daniele De Giorgis and, in the portico on the main facade of the Castle, just a few steps away, Marina Torchio‘s sculptures occupy the loggia above the staircase.

A CATALOGUE AND TWO PHOTOGRAPHERS

The exhibition’s design and the protagonism of the artists led to the decision to create, on the one hand, a catalogue with photographs of the works installed, entrusted to Alessandro Zambianchi and, on the other, a gallery of photographic portraits of the artists on show, taken by Giorgio Olivero.