MACELLERIA

Room 8

«How to decide where they begin and where they end, in these icons that are at once domestic and ritualistic – in these snapshots taken against the backdrop of a memorial duplicity in which the enigmatic solemnity of the biblical sacrifices and the hasty, angry pragmatism of Françoise, the cook at the Recerche, seem to converge, grappling with a “beast” that just won’t die – the domain of horror and that of pity, the province of desire and that of rejection, the domain of condemnation and that of forgiveness? The fact that it is impossible to answer is, I believe, only the confirmation of a complexity that much earlier had been impossible not to intuit and in which the mastery of the sign and the imprint of the masters precipitate, integrating to death – so fraternal, so fatal, these, to become, in a certain sense, even anonymous, to no longer be identifiable, I don’t know, as Courbet or Bacon, but only and in bulk, precisely, as “masters”.»
Giovanni Raboni, 1998

In a continuous technical experimentation, with these works Testori puts watercolour to the test, here used dry to the point of being unrecognisable. Where it is not possible to find the animals to be portrayed in a butcher’s shop, Testori’s work is linked to macabre family anecdotes of black cats killed with a rifle and delivered in a sack to the house in time to make unsuspecting doormen faint, guilty of excessive curiosity.