by Massimo Kaufmann

A precious room in Casa Testori — not too big, intimate, and warmed by a coffered ceiling decorated with laurel leaves, now partially faded. It’s the study of this grand house, overlooking the garden, with its beautiful, typically Lombard floor made of hexagonal tiles in black, red, and gray.

In these days of early spring, the camellias are bursting into bloom — the most beautiful gift for me, as I’ve been working for the past two weeks to transform this room into a painting. Alessandro is helping me draw the vertical lines — the preliminary work began on Monday, March 3. Accompanied by the music of Brahms, I start taking possession of these rather tall walls by tracing vertical bands of varying widths.

The experiment consists in bringing into my work the contributions of other artists. I’ve invited eight of them, all of whom have previously taken part in Giorni Felici exhibitions since Casa Testori began its activity in 2009. These are eight artists connected by a network of relationships and friendships, some long-standing — with emotional bonds, even family ties. I try to establish a harmony among the people that is completely independent of their individual works.

In alphabetical order, they are: Stefano Arienti, Marco Cingolani, Giovanni Frangi, Andrea Mastrovito, Fulvia Mendini, Katja Noppes, Michela Pomaro, and Massimo Uberti.

To each of them, I propose a simple principle: imagine, I tell them, that I am a musician — a jazz player, for example — and I’m inviting you to a jam session. Each of you plays, so to speak, a different instrument; I conduct the band, the themes, the rhythms — but each of you, with total freedom, plays your own music, your own solo.

It may be a bit presumptuous at this point to draw comparisons, and yet, in the past, the beauty of a house, a palace, a church often resulted from the convergence of multiple disciplines and crafts that could adapt and blend together. In the Middle Ages, cathedrals were always the result of countless and diverse skills — from architect to marble cutter, to wood or stone sculptor, to glass painters and goldsmiths. In the Renaissance and then the Baroque period, this artistic approach reached astonishing and incomparable levels of beauty.

If we go beyond our cultural horizons and visit a mosque in Morocco or a temple in India, we realize how many artists — often anonymous — contributed to an idea of art that is not merely a collective work, but a genuine vision of human endeavor as cosmology, as the intelligence of one’s culture, and as a longing for beauty.

I firmly believe — now that I’m no longer a boy — that art preserves the most worthy achievements of humankind. Barring a few (rare) good political or scientific ideas, what truly deserves to survive from the past millennia is almost always the work of artists, poets, or musicians. Almost everything else is just conflict or violence. To all those who usually don’t even notice this, I still extend my most sincere best wishes.

Each artist is working without knowing exactly what will happen beside their piece. I reserve the right to use my painting as a bonding element between the different works — I try to create liaisons, correspondences, and contrasts. And as we continue, we begin to notice the emergence and revelation of our “hidden harmonies,” which arise as if by osmosis.

My “colleagues” have already jokingly renamed it the Cappella Kaufmann (with all the double meanings implied). To be able to outline — if not a full “method,” at least an approach — already seems to me, today, Monday, March 17 at noon, about halfway through the work, a pretty good result.

Alessandro photographs all the artists as their workdays unfold. Not knowing what will appear beside your piece and still drawing and painting on the basis of a conditional suggestion vaguely resembles a game played by the Surrealist poets: one would draw on a strip of paper, then fold it to hide the image and pass it on to a friend to continue it blindly.

This serial and simultaneously “blind” technique not only produced unexpected and curious results but also revealed the deeper, subconscious meaning of human relationships.

This Surrealist game — known as Cadavre Exquis (Exquisite Corpse) — and the idea of a Winter Garden came together in the title Giardini Squisiti (Exquisite Gardens), which I chose for the exhibition together with Maria Morganti.

The previous idea was to call it In Praise of Laziness, but we’re both too lazy to explain what laziness truly means to us. Maybe next time. I nonetheless recommend, for those interested in the subject, a little treatise by a brilliant colleague, Kazimir Severinovich Malevich, titled Laziness as the Truth of Man (Vitebsk, 1921).