LO STUDIO TESTORI

Andrea Mastrovito 

To make this room I kept in my mind one of the rare pictures portraying Giovanni Testori in his private study. Here the writer used to guard paintings of naked men that he attributed to Courbet and Géricault. In this picture, over the library, you can spot five painting in the background. About four of them we have informations and dimensions, but about the fifth – a man’s trunk above a black man portrait – we don’t know anything. Looking at the picture, I reproduced in their precise original position the four well-known paintings, just by using the material that made up the walls, or layers of paint, the plaster till the cement and bricks, as in the room with the picture of the  whole Testori family. In this work who is talking is the absence: whenever we take off from the wall a picture that has been there for a long time, we realize that on the wall, where the pictures was, a darker silhouette remains, saved from the wear of light and dust. Starting from the idea of that trace left by paintings, I got to imagine that the whole image was imprinted on the wall that, pierced, blended and carved, it eventually gave back the memory it was retaining. Exactly in front of those four carved-in-wall paintings, a plasma TV is proposing a selection of 13 films, all about Art and History of Art, made thanks to Zizi’s (Marco Marcassoli) direction between 2003 and 2006. All these films are a reflection – both critical and not – about Art, its gears, about the History of Art itself and the relationship between artist and work, and they all find here, in that room where Testori used to spend long hours, their natural place. The journey starts from the Haikus – a sort of tableaux vivants or little sketch also about contemporary art claims – to arrive to those 150 plastic tacks to improve your artistic talent where I imagine a number of famous modern artists when they were six years old and give them some plastic tacks to reproduce their most famed works in the simplest forms, to arrive to CH where, with Stefano Arienti and Luca Francesconi as main characters, a museum is stormed – as for Tim Burton Batman – and all of its works are destroyed and defaced in the name of a new and violent ultra futuristic avant-garde.