The last room of the ground floor itinerary offers a comparison between two works of extremely strong impact. As visitors enter, they find in front of them two large ceramic works by Bertozzi & Casoni. Giampaolo Bertozzi and Stefano Del Monte Casoni have been working as a team since 1980. They create disconcerting sculptures in which ceramics are used to create representations that negate the delicate, graceful nature of the material. Composizione scomposizione [Comosition Decomposition] is a combination of tubes, connecters, wheels and taps suggesting the idea of a clearly nonfunctioning functionality. It is also a depiction of rules that have accumulated to the point of consolidating themselves as intricate conglomerations, without rhyme or reason. Corruption, in Bertozzi & Casoni’s works, has often taken the form of food that is “corrupted” by oxidation processes. In this series – the complete cycle of Composizione scomposizione consists of seven panels – the metaphor is more expressly aimed at the chaos unleashed in a social organization when the rules are changed.

The link with Filippo Berta’s video is cogent and immediate. Homo homini lupus, a work created in 2011, was presented for the first time at the Madre of Naples. Berta takes literally Plautus’s famous expression, which became the concept underlying Thomas Hobbes’s philosophy. In a moonlit scenario suggesting the end of history, a pack of wolves wrangles around an Italian flag. The piece of cloth is violently bitten and torn till it is reduced to shreds. The video may be interpreted as a brutal metaphor of a social gathering where the logic of arrogance gains the upper hand, thereby treading underfoot even an item, the national flag, that should be a collective symbol. Corruption is a negative force that destroys relations, an open doorway to violence, even when it is underhand, non-explicit and, in its way, “sincere”, like that of thewolves fighting over the flag.

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This is a small corner room, the walls of which were all painted in 2013 by a team overseen by Massimo Kaufmann. At the centre of the room, the exhibition itinerary envisages Testa femminile [Female Head], a new work, displayed for the first time, by Luca Pignatelli. Pignatelli has always been attentive to the theme of memory and the past, conceiving his own art almost as an act of resistance against the implacable corrosive action of time. In this case, the salvage work involved the support of the painting, which is also a sculpture. It was created, in fact, on an iron sheet discarded from the roof of a church in Engadina and intended for the dump.

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Three artists meet in this fascinating room in Casa Testori, creating a dialogue that has recourse to bold, involving expressive forms. Marco Cingolani has brought into play a banner-poster, an authentic piece of publicity art. The slogan, in great letters, poses a demand that might seem obvious if it were not negated at every moment by reality Il dovere al potere [Let Power Stand by Duty]. The sheer nakedness of the work leaves us speechless: it is like a cry echoing in silence. While the banner is a work that Cingolani has carried with him for many years, almost as an imploration, the painting in this room was specially created for the exhibition at Casa Testori. It is a portrait of Bernard de Mandeville, an Anglo-Dutch physician, philosopher and satirist to whom we owe a definition of hypocrisy which has entered the common language: “Private vices, public benefits”. His best-known book, in fact, published in 1714, is entitled “The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Public Benefits”. In its first version, it was called “The Grumbling Hive, or Knaves Turn’d Honest”, leaving no doubt as to the real identity of the “public benefits”.

Massimo Kaufmann has brought to Casa Testori a “shouted-to-the-fourwinds” version of a work he created at the beginning of the 1990s. As with Cingolani, the chosen means of expression was deliberately shouted to the four winds: a wallpaper which exaggeratedly enlarges the original and emphasizes its disquieting message. The cycle took as its inspiration Goya’s celebrated caprices, a merciless depiction of corrupt society, dominated by lies and abuse of power. Kaufmann reinforces this message with a bold, contemporary language. The originals were created, in fact, with typewriter characters, accentuating the caricatural aspects of this portrayal of a society seemingly corroded by all-pervasive corruption. In order to stress the public scope of the message contained in this work, Kaufmann also created a signed and numbered version of the wallpaper, on sale to visitors.

Stefano Arienti has contributed a fascinating Installation to this room, entitled Lame Italia [Italian Ploughshares], in which tools belonging to memories of the artist’s rural origins – he was born in Asola, in the Province of Mantua – assume an enigmatic appearance, as if they have lost the positive sense of their function. A delicate metaphor illustrating the overturning of values that ensues as a result of social pathologies such as corruption.

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Two photographers meet in this domestic environment, they exploiting the same device: pairs of photographs that evidently create a dialogue between themselves, but the relationship between which is not so clear. A celebrated image by Letizia Battaglia of a mafia crime in Palermo, I due Cristi [The Two Christs] of 1982, clashes with another image, Il Ballo, Festa di Capodanno a Villa Airoldi [The Ball, New Year’s Celebration at Villa Airoldi] taken in 1985 in Palermo, documenting the blissful indifference of society. Blood and crystal glasses, dark and sparkling light, threatening silence and bursts of merriment. And if these were all images from a single film? Giovanni Hänninen relates the same story in Milan. The sandwich booth emerging from the fog is that of Via Celoria and is the property of Loreno Tetti. He has been called the “anti-’ndrangheta sandwich seller”. Loreno Tetti, in fact, was the only witness who did not withdraw in the trial against the street sellers’ protection racket run by the Flachi clan. Shortly after he gave his testimony, on 19 July 2012, his truck was set on fire. From small to large-scale economy: in front of the Milan Stock Exchange, there is a sculpture by Maurizio Cattelan. Provocative, but thought-challenging: is it really out of place? It was put there at the height of the crisis that brought Italy to its knees. A crisis that exploded as a result of the corrupt workings of the financial world. “The contemporary crime boss”, writes Hänninen with Alberto Amoretti, who carried out the research on the basis of photographic reports, “is far removed from the cliché of the rough mafioso, he is a white-collar worker who has studied and is well-versed in economics, finance and technology”.

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Migrants have experienced at first hand the blackmail of corruption. They experienced it on the other side of the Mediterranean when they had to put their hard won savings in the hands of the boat operators or their agents. They have often met it in Italy, when their reception finished in the hands of organizations run by racketeers. Two works in this exhibition, of great impact and value, bear witness to the migrants. Tindar, the “nickname” of a Milanese artist now living in Rome – and who has opened the doors of his home to a migrant – is present with a triptych inspired by an experience at the frontier, near Calais, in the months of the “Jungle”, the great refugee camp of migrants hoping to cross the Channel. With Migrazioni [Migrations], Tindar overturned a paradigm. He asked the migrants (for a small payment) to gather the footprints of those who, for whatever reason, passed through the camp. The footprints, mounted on panels covered with earth, create a nebulous image of presences crossing from one world to another. In a work such as this, Tindar brings into play his being as an artist. The same thing happens with a charismatic name from another generation. Corrado Levi has brought to Casa Testori a photo of himself (taken by Beppe Finessi), in which he is wearing clothes found on the rocks of Otranto (Vestiti di arrivati [Clothes of people arriving], 2015). Clothes abandoned by migrants who had landed there. Levi gathered them up and put them on. “I imagined I was other people’s bodies”, he has said. “I know I was pretending, but when I could, I felt the thing inside myself. When I take them off and leave them there on a beach, there on the rocks for others to find, that is the moment when I hope to change my life. This is freedom. It’s like baptism… For believers”.

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A single artist monopolizes this room: Antonio Marras. Known as a stylist, he has always combined his professional activity with a prolific artistic production which was recently celebrated in a major exhibition at the Milan Triennial. Marras’s work is an installation, the content of which interweaves closely with the other works in the room. Le malelingue [Malicious Tongues] is an installation consisting of a cascade of darting tongues flowing from a great pile of books. The work is inspired by one of Marras’s best loved artists, Carol Rama. The reiterating tongues extending over the space appear as an ironic condemnation of the “private vice” of gossip, which embraces far from beneficial forms of public conduct.

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Three artists of very different styles and generations face each other in one of the most magical spaces of Casa Testori. At this point, the question of corruption becomes internal to art, with an energy all its own that attacks the works from within. This is the message we seem to get from the two ceramic vase-shaped sculptures by Alessandro Roma. One is collapsing upon itself, the other is intended to hold flowers which are nevertheless unable to grow there. The contrast between the original desire for beauty intrinsic to such works, and a drastically opposite process, appears as a lyrically emblematic evolution. Francesco Fossati makes reference, with his language perennially bordering upon the probable, to another inevitable aspect of reality. Artists themselves may often become a link in the perverse chain of corruption. Fossati’s label does not aim to tell a truth, but to unmask the ever-present risk of hypocrisy. We can create correct messages, while at the same time setting up perverse mechanisms as a result of our marketing decisions. A beautiful statue may become the tool of drug traffickers. The fact that it remains beautiful is a disturbing and thought-provoking problem. Alessandro Verdi, lastly, offers two very recent works, one of which was specifically conceived as part of the “art AGAINST corruption” project. The small human figure moving in a vacuum is the prototype, in fact, of the paintings on the columns of the Sala Testori at the Teatro Franco Parenti of Milan, which hosted the meeting that launched the project. In the second work, the small figure is seen against a vast cosmos, painted with intense blue pigment.

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To understand what this warning is about, we need only move to the Salon of Casa Testori. Three masters of contemporary Italian art are exhibiting here: Mimmo Paladino, Emilio Isgrò and Gianni Dessì. Paladino’s work is a sculpture created in 2013 and inspired by the troubled life-story of the great 16th century musician Gesualdo da Venosa. Like the twists of a serpent with neither head nor tail, a serpent from which we cannot free ourselves, a steel wire holds prisoner a head made of aluminium. This master, born in Paduli, considers himself first and foremost a painter, and for this reason says that “in my sculptures I have always thought of the artists who made use of this graphic architecture even in the past”. This inextricable knot holds captive the human icon, which Paladino nevertheless portrays with its irreducibile content of tension and beauty. The imagery already seen in Andrea Bianconi’s work undergoes here a dramatic and disturbing development. In his innumerable proclamations against the evil wrought by corruption upon people’s lives, Pope Francis – who has described this as a “social cancer” in his apostolic letter Evangelii Gaudium – has recourse to the metaphor of “ramification”: something that develops progressively and uncontrollably. Paladino’s work evokes this deleterious process.

Also exhibited in this room are four paintings from one of the most famous cycles by Emilio Isgrò: La costituzione cancellata. Rappresentazione di un crimine [The Constitution Cancelled: Portrayal of a Crime], from 2010. “I was pushed in this direction by the melancholy disappointment of an Italian who sees his country collapsing”, declared the artist when explaining the motive underlying this work. Cancellation is, in this case, an act of profound respect. The Constitution, Isgrò has said, “is a work of art, on a level with St. Francis’s Cantico and Dante’s Commedia. It is written in perfect Italian, simple, bureaucratic but without falling into gobbledygook. The fathers of the constitution were persons of the highest culture”. But the Constitution cancelled is also the “Portrayal of a Crime”, as the full title states. Isgrò makes use of cancellations to show how far too many people play games with the text of the constitution. These, in fact, are the surviving words that provide titles for the four works on display: “A handicapped indivisible, Secret associations are notprohibited, Those born in February are Senators as of right, Dated 27 December 1947. Respect combined with condemnation, veneration combined with bitterness: these are the sensations communicated by Isgrò’s work.

Gianni Dessì’s diptych is a very recent work. It consists of oil paintings on canvas, done in a sort of black on black. One of the works, A&E, refers to the event that symbolically represents the advent of corruption. The serpent appears as the great corruptor. The other work, Insieme [Together], has another human figure: to the left of the figure is a geometrical element which, cold and neutral, seems to spring like a trap.

At the centre of the room, Katja Noppes has a surprise for us. This is a simple Installation that sets in motion a process from which we cannot escape. Images of corruption, war and injustice, gathered from all latitudes over more than 25 years, are reflected in the mirror. We see only the reflection, and our own image mingles with them, as does that of the enchanted environment in which we find ourselves. Corruption affects us, therefore. We cannot get away from it and we cannot illude ourselves that we have nothing to do with what we see. There is no room for neutrality. Extrapersonal, peripersonal and personal spaces are superimposed.

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The art AGAINST corruption itinerary starts with a work with emblematic content: Italy upside down by Andrea Bianconi, AiLati (2017), a work specifically conceived for this exhibition. Bianconi, an artist from Vicenza, lives and works in Italy and in the USA. He has intended, in this work, to be outrightly frank. With the slender, precise, marks of his acrylic pen, marks that suggest a seismograph, he draws a map in line with the perspective made famous by Luciano Fabro’s work of 1968. Italy as an upturned country, ready to implode. Bianconi’s delicate lines launch a gentle warning.

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Olga Schigal, born in Russia

Olga Schigal presents a camper – her camper – as a sculpture and as a performance. A nest, into which she would like to move permanently, a mobile home, with nothing superfluous, without any territorial, sentimental or spiritual association. Shoonya, therefore, is the name of a means of transport and of a work. The term derives from yoga and indicates the meeting point between solid and void, a matrix from which anything might originate. The creation of a connection with something else, and also a connection with visitors, since Olga Schigal welcomes them in her house on wheels and tells them her story. It is, at one and the same time, inside and outside the exhibition, inside and outside the art system, poised on the ridge, with no roots in anything but itself.

Claudia Alexandrino, born in Portugal

The Portuguese origin of the designer Claudia Alexandrino, known as an illustrator under her pseudonym Shut Up Claudia, means that the idea of saudade has strong connotations for her. At the same time, she is fully aware of the difficulty of making this concept comprehensible and sharing the sensation. She has therefore decided to decompose the idea, simplifying it as far as possible, using childish references and simple, immediate symbols. Two stylized houses are linked to each other by a dashed line, twisting and broken, indicating the complexity of the completed itinerary. Steps and a podium symbolize objects which have been aimed for and reached. Past and present coexist in the same scene. The title of the work, Matar a saudade, is an expression indicating the moment when this indefinable feeling disappears, when the desire to see again a person, place or thing is satisfied. It is the phrase Claudia Alexandrino says when she returns to Portugal.

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