The works of the two artists are placed next to each other, one on top of the other, around the fireplace that dominates the room. Black on black, Samorì’s painting is framed by the marble, requiring the visitor to bend down in search of the picture, a likeness of a sixteenth century Flemish portrait. Naturally, above the fireplace should be an official portrait, evoked by Fato by leaving the subject’s armour visible but concealing any unique features. In the opposite wall, next to one of his frescoes that evokes the female figure, Samorì embeds a profound tribute to Testori. Over the image of Francesco Cairo’s Testa del Battista (Head of John the Baptist), which belonged to the writer, a cascade of threads evokes the 73 Teste del Battista, realised by Testori with the thin trace of a fountain pen and exhibited here on the first floor. Finally, in the opposite corner, a composite work by Matteo Fato that starts from the suggestion of fire, iridescent because of its fatuousness, here imagined as taken from the central fireplace in order to be portrayed on the canvas and repeated in counterpart in the engraving next to it, which in turn is placed like an altarpiece on an “antependium” of monochromes very dear to the artist.

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THE ARTWORKS

Nicola Samorì, Manto minimo, 2011, oil on panel, AmC Collezione Coppola, Vicenza

Matteo Fato, Nudo all’Antica (4), 2014, oil on linen, plywood transport box, Courtesy of the Artist and Galleria Michela Rizzo, Venice

Nicola Samorì, Babette, 2017, fresco on alveolam Courtesy Monitor, Rome/Lisbon

Nicola Samorì, Profeta, 2018, oil on copper, antique frame, Courtesy Monitor, Rome/Lisbon

Matteo Fato, (will-o-the-wisp), 2015 / 2018, oil on linen, plywood transport case, rabbit glue and pigment on linen, drypoint on copper, MDF frame, Courtesy of the Artist and Galleria Michela Rizzo, Venice

Matteo Fato, Senza titolo (Nuvola II), 2015, oil on linen, plywood transport box and mirror, Courtesy of the Artist and Galleria Michela Rizzo, Venice.

The room painted by Massimo Kaufmann in 2014 – with several artist friends being brought in to help with the task – hosts the exhibition’s signature piece. Like two sides of the same coin, the small paintings, placed in a wooden casing in the centre of the room, recount two events that are both analogous and opposing, between history and fiction. Samorì’s work is inspired by a famous photo immortalising the moment two “Monuments men” recovered a Self Portrait by Rembrandt, which had been hidden by Nazis. Fato’s work, on the other hand, recounts a discovery both fake and grotesque: the large head is a pseudo Roman find that emerged on an American beach and which came from the nearby Hollywood Studios, where it was created for a historical blockbuster a few years earlier.

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THE ARTWORKS

Nicola Samorì, Salt, 2013, oil on panel, AmC Coppola Collection, Vicenza

Matteo Fato, Untitled, 2013, oil on linen, plywood transport box, Private collection

Thanks to Matteo Fato’s intervention, the room is completely transformed, becoming, in fact, an articulated polyptych that the visitor is called to enter, to participate in. The artist’s mind is opened in front of us, allowing us to discover the creative process behind the work. On the walls we find, painted individually, a disoriented elderly person, a fork incomprehensibly stuck into a wooden beam and a fragrant plant. Three elements actually

gathered in the place that inspired the work, put in dialogue with one another. A singularity that becomes a fusion in the collage in the mirrored frame and in the large final painting. The images are somehow summarised and “illuminated” by the predominant colour cast of the room, expressed in green monochrome and by a faint neon; an element that, to the artist, evokes in itself the third dimension – Fontana docet – but which is also a disturbing element, which distracts attention from the canvases. It is a necessary disorientation, desired by the artist, which invites the viewer to search for a real perception of his work, thanks to getting past the direct visual of the painting.

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THE ARTWORK

Matteo Fato, Senza titolo con Collage (impersonale), 2012 / 2016, oil on linen, rabbit glue and pigment on linen, plywood shipping crates, neon sculpture, collage on paper, plywood frame and mirror 
Courtesy of the Artist and Galleria Michela Rizzo, Venice

On the wall in front of the main staircase, another two small points of unity and dissimilarity sit alongside one another. A discreet presence, significantly placed next to the large library dedicated to the masters of the past. On the right, the face of a loved one is traced in a thin but tenacious line; on the left, Fato’s characteristic whirl foreshadows the explosion of colour that awaits the visitor in the second part of the house.

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THE ARTWORKS

Nicola Samorì, Untitled, 2017, oil on copper, AmC Collezione Coppola, Vicenza, Courtesy EIGEN+ART, Berlin/Leipzig

Matteo Fato, Florilegio (6), circa 2018, oil on canvas, plywood transport case, Courtesy of the Artist and Galleria Michela Rizzo, Venice

A large wooden sculpture by Samorì dominates the centre of the room, its design closely related to the Casa Testori garden. The sculpture simulates the forms of nature, recreating them artificially to create an anthropomorphic figure, discernible but unrecognisable. The head, made from wood found on the beach and corroded by waves, looks at Matteo Fato’s diptych, dedicated to Ennio Flaiano, a portrait with the sweet features of a fabric dear to the artist, whose forms he has remodulated in a touching act of affinity born from his reading of Autobiografia del Blu di Prussia (Autobiography of Prussian Blue).

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THE ARTWORKS

Nicola Samorì, Dell’arpia, 2017, walnut and poplar wood

Matteo Fato, Autoritratto (del) Blu di Prussia, 2017, oil on linen, oil on panel, plywood carrying case, AmC Coppola Collection, Vicenza, Courtesy of the Artist and Galleria Michela Rizzo, Venice

On the fireplace, a neoclassical style bust made by Samorì, sculpted from a block of onyx highly compromised by the natural impurities of the stone. The sculpture is constructed, therefore, by taking away parts of the material growing around a void. Opposite, with a series of small framed works, the artist presents some variations on two faces by the painter Hans Memling, tormented by the point of a burin, by the path of a bed bug through wet paint or partially hidden by the removal of the paint layer, which evokes the presence of a burqa. But the living room is also the location of a tribute to Giovanni Testori, and not just thanks to the painting on copper, a copy of one of two Davids by Tanzio da Varallo, an artist rediscovered by Testori and one of his favourites. In fact, here the exhibition’s second protagonist enters the scene, with Matteo Fato’s triple portrait of Testori and his Library, built around the easel that belonged to the writer-painter. Here the wooden material, always prominent in Fato’s work, creates an apparently unitary block, evoking the piles of books that surrounded Testori, and is used to hold a sole tome that has been completely transformed by paint. In a total fusion of colour and words, another book belonging to Testori is pressed onto the still fresh portrait, so as to absorb the features of the face next to it, in a process that evokes a sinopia, the Shroud or the Veil of Veronica.

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THE ARTWORKS

Nicola Samorì, Onichina (madremacchia), 2017/18, Mexican onyx
Nicola Samorì, Testa con lacrima, 2017, oil on panel, AmC Collezione Coppola, Courtesy Monitor, Rome/Lisbon
Nicola Samorì, Madonna dello zucchero, 2016, oil on panel, AmC Collezione Coppola, Vicenza, Courtesy Monitor, Rome/Lisbon
Nicola Samorì, Traspirazione della Vergine, 2016, oil on panel, AmC Collezione Coppola, Vicenza, Courtesy Monitor, Rome/Lisbon
Nicola Samorì, Pestante, 2018, oil on copper, Courtesy Monitor, Rome/Lisbon

Matteo Fato, Il fatalista senza padrone (1923 – 1993), 2018, oil on linen, oil on book glued with pigment preparation, plywood transport case, oil on book glued with pigment preparation, plywood pedestal, Courtesy of the Artist and Galleria Michela Rizzo, Venice

Three works by Nicola Samorì welcome us to the exhibition. The large work on the wall in front of us was made by painting a precise copy of a Maddalena by Luca Giordano and, with the paint still fresh, pushing the paint downwards, making the layer curl in on itself and almost entirely compromising its legibility. This is not simply a disfigurement, but a way for the artist to accentuate the existential drama experienced by the saint, who emerges from the void with even greater force. Opposite, two frescoes are torn and engraved, their visual impact accentuated by as many small sculptures: on the right, a Cristo risorto (resurrected Christ) from Germany; on the left, an anthropomorphic statue, made with different materials by the artist himself.

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THE ARTWORKS

Nicola Samorì, Il cavacarne, 2014/15 oil on copper, AmC Collezione Coppola, Vicenza
Nicola Samorì, Firmamento, 2017 Fresco on alveolam, Courtesy Monitor, Rome/Lisbon
Nicola Samorì, Pentesilea, 2017/18, Torn fresco

Se la realtà non è solo un fotogramma ideally closes with dissolving film frames from two videos: AlessandraFerrini’s essay film Negotiating Amnesia and Jacopo Rinaldi’s video installation Light Meter.

These two works focus, in very different ways, on the theme of memory, and of forgetting or questionino history, as a highly sensitive potential ideological tool.

Ferrini’s documentary addresses the issue of telling the story of Italian colonialism in the Horn of Africa between the war in Ethiopia in 1935-36 and its historic reconstruction in contemporary Italy. The artist asks how ideologies and manipulation still affect Italians’ collective image of the country’s early twentieth-century colonial past and how we preserve and pass on memories, revealing intentional amnesia and partial reconstruction of events and stories.

Rinaldi’s work, on the other hand, is a wider-ranging consideration of vision, of images of our history (and art history) and our mechanisms of vision and construction of the image. The artist photographs the technical systems used in some of Rome’s bestknown churches to light up paintings in sculptures for a limited time, resulting in a constant alternation of light and dark, image and censorship. The result is an apparent metaphor for the action of history itself: the voluntary action of the present, turning on a light which is inevitably destined to go off, casting even the most important masterpieces of western art into the darkness of oblivion.

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LightMeter_2_Estasi di santa Teresa d'Avila, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Santa Maria della Vittoria

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LightMeter_1_Ciclo pittorico di San Matteo, Caravaggio, San Luigi dei Francesi

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Jacopo Rinaldi 

One of the most complex works Rinaldi has produced over the years focused on Harald Szeemann and his archive, starting with a documentary the artist made in 2014 at the former Szeemann Archive, Fabbrica Rosa, in Maggia, in Switzerland’s Canton Ticino, when it was being emptied and moved to the USA. This inspired the artist to begin reflecting on the relationships between space, curatorial work and the dynamics of projecting the research methodologies of the most important curator of the twentieth century onto the place where he studied and worked. This beginning has led to a series of editorial, graphic, video and photographic works; the exhibition presents a site-specific installation intended to suggest a hypothetical dialogue between Testori and Szeemann. For while the exhibition opens with Alessandra Ferrini’s reflection on Morelli and Longhi’s recognition method, it closes with an intuitive opening up toward the methods and systems of relation and production characterising Szeemann’s contemporary art so far. An entanglement of glimpses and methods which, in the end, affords a new key to interpretation of the entire exhibition project.

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Jacopo Rinaldi 

In Casa Testori Jacopo Rinaldi reconstructs an installation created in Salento in 2016, designed for the railway line between Lecce and Gagliano del Capo. The artist had replaced the curtains in one carriage of the train with fabrics printed with frames of a short video filmed in 1935 from a Littorina, a motor coach created during the fascist years which came to be synonymous with “train” in Italian popular culture. As the artist writes, “the cars [of the Lecce and Gagliano del Capo line] are very small and have 16 or 17 windows, exactly the number of frames per second the human eye needs to see in order to perceive fluid motion. And so I wanted to print on the curtains of these windows 16 or 17 frames of a video about Africa from Istituto Luce. The video, made for a newsreel, was filmed from a train during the inauguration of the Oltremare Pugliese railway. The idea was intermittency between the fixed image of a video, which is actually in motion, and an image which would be fixed only if the train were not in motion. The result was an intermittent palimpsest comparing different times: closed curtains stationary in the past, open curtains moving in the present”. In this installation for Casa Testori, Rinaldi installs the curtains taken from the train so that they interact with the video from Istituto Luce, creating a new interval between past and present, this time in dialogue with the other rooms in the home and with wider-ranging reflection on the relationship between image and reality that is the theme of the exhibition as a whole.

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