Andrea Mastrovito
To create this room, I took into account one of the rare photos portraying Giovanni Testori in his private study.
Here, the writer kept paintings depicting male nudes, which he attributed to Courbet and Géricault.
In the photo, five paintings can be seen in the background, above the bookshelf. Four of them are well documented with known dimensions; about the fifth — the male torso above the portrait of a Moor — nothing is known.
Looking at the photo, I recreated the four known paintings in their original positions, using only the materials that made up the wall itself: layers of paint, plaster, down to the cement and bricks — as in the room featuring the image of the entire Testori family.
In this work, it is absence that speaks: when we remove a painting that has hung on a wall for a long time, we notice that a darker silhouette remains where the painting once was — preserved from light and dust.
Starting from that idea of the trace left behind by the paintings, I imagined that the entire figure had remained imprinted on the wall, which, once pierced, cut, and excavated, finally gave back the memory it had retained.
Directly in front of the four images carved into the wall, a plasma screen displays a selection of 13 videos, all focused on Art and Art History, directed by Zizi (Marco Marcassoli) between 2003 and 2006.
All the videos are reflections — critical and otherwise — on art, its mechanisms, the history of art itself, and the relationship between artist and artwork. They find their natural home here, in what was the studio where Testori spent much of his time observing and writing.
From Haiku, a kind of tableaux vivants or short sketches about the pretensions of contemporary and non-contemporary art, to 150 Plastic Pegs to Express Your Artistic Talent, in which I imagine bringing a group of famous modern artists back to the age of six and handing them plastic pegs to see them recreate their most iconic works in the simplest forms, and CH, featuring Stefano Arienti and Luca Francesconi, where a museum is stormed — in a style reminiscent of Tim Burton’s Batman — and all the artworks are destroyed and defaced in the name of a new, violent, ultra-futurist avant-garde.
