Room 7

«Today Gèricault continues to be a point of departure for Testori. His lesson and his memory survive the idea of the anatomical fragment abandoned to itself, a mute interweaving of cut legs and arms. But Testori has taken a step further, he no longer needs butchery. There is no longer any need to cut, to chop off legs and arms and then tie them up in a bow, in a still life in night light. It is enough to paint a genital, to obtain the same effect of mutilation. The anatomical and genital fragment itself is enough. […] The surface cracks, leaving open spaces, crater-like voids of light. And in these spaces the light does not break through, but bursts. […] Light is sucked out of nothing, it is only an intervention of darkness. It is darkness that produces it. In this way, together with their luminosity, forms take shape that are not forms but ectoplasms, ghosts of nipples, breasts, vulvas, buttocks, suddenly materialised as if ready to return precipitously on their steps, to dissolve in the darkness of a well. Absurdly plastic images, absurdly fleshy, because there is no distinction between their form and the glow of their ephemeral and astonished light.»
Cesare Garboli, 1975

In 1975, Testori exhibited a series of large graphite papers with anatomical subjects and sensual fleshy flowers at the historic Galleria del Naviglio in Milan.

Room 6

« I believe that few Italian artists bear the stigmata of the “modern artist” like Giovanni Testori. His fatal need to go further and further, farther and farther away, where no one can stay with him: his desperate desire to know sin, damnation, remorse and delirium; and his cold will to construct for himself, day by day, hour by hour, book by book, a tragic destiny, what could be more modern than this? Faced with a will like his, each of us wonders how long they can resist, without giving in or breaking. For my part, I must confess to an admiring aversion. Even if it is naive to write this, I wish that so many energies unleashed to break every limit would gather within the limits that are granted to us. But what is Testori looking for behind the form? Although it seems almost impious to speak of it, he seeks God, whose true name escapes art, as it does every philosophy; and absolute sin, evil without remedy, which are equally unrepresentable with words and their human colours.»
Pietro Citati, 1974

In 1974, Testori exhibited at the Galleria Iolas in Milan, run by Alexander Iolas, the great international dealer of Greek origin. He switched from oil to acrylic: in a series of almost monochrome paintings, the material becomes less jagged. The large female figures, on the verge of being swallowed up by the white background, release their strength in the vitality of the blood.

Room 5

«What happened to Testori was what had already happened to Victor Hugo: writing and drawing at the same time. More precisely, to give birth to word and drawing together, in an intense and dramatic play of different signs, all aimed at making visible the very face of poetry.»
Carlo Bo, 1987

The relationship between writing and drawing was always very close for Testori and, leafing through the manuscript notebooks, one discovers that the blank spaces of the pages “hosted” Testori’s expressive vein in a period in which, at least between 1958 and 1964, it did not lead to real paintings or important autonomous drawings. After a few full-page drawings that appeared in the Gilda del Mac Mahon notebook, it was the writing of the poem I Trionfi that prompted the writer to create numerous large drawings, often with a floral theme. On some pages, the size of the drawing and the attention paid to the details of the flowers, clearly portrayed from life, almost seem to reverse the roles, transforming the notebooks into commented herbals.
But drawing is also the crossroads of Testori’s theatrical and even cinematographic activity. A cycle of ten drawings bears witness to the work of the writer who, in 1970, for the script of a film never made and dedicated to Hamlet, wanted to design the costumes, with precise indications of colours and materials. In short, drawing proves to be at the heart of Testori’s creative production, whatever expressive path it is destined to take.