The works Remember, Repeat, Rework (2015) are two photographic diptychs realised by Fogarolli by appropriating and collating archive images. In both these works, a portrait of a young woman in a state of amnesia, admitted to an American hospital in the first half of the twentieth century, is related to a photograph of the ethnographic collection of Amsterdam’s Tropenmuseum, which shows the features of some sculptures discovered in the Dutch colonies in Indonesia. In this unusual, Warburg-style visual dialogue, analogies between dissimilar sources are created, in which the first subject’s state of incapability seems to find a response in the (hypothetical) thaumaturgical capabilities of tribal fetishes.

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The theme of failure becomes metaphorical in works such as Sulla retta via (On the right path) (2014) of Filippo Berta. The latter work presents a group trying to walk in single file, following the transient border between earth and sea defined by the waves. It is a line that is continuously broken up, thus highlighting the impossibility of man finding a balance between primitive emotional-bestial nature and the rationality necessary for being part of society.
Christian Fogarolli, retracing the relationship between art and scientific disciplines, investigates the fine boundary between normality and deviance, as well as the arbitrary character of the relative categorisations. This is particularly evident in the work Misura di prevenzione (Preventative measure) (2017), an installation that resembles a water level, a device that has been used since ancient times, utilising it to depict the concept of chemical imbalance, today considered at the root of many mental disorders.

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The exhibition opens with Christian Fogarolli’s sculpture Loose (2017), which invites the visitor to interact with the work in order to be able to slowly begin to grasp the image-identity that emerges from a play of refractions on a mirrored surface. The archive photographic image appropriated by the artist re-emerges in fragments under the shapeless lead surface and to see it requires patience and expertise, a process that symbolically stages a going beyond first retinal observations of appearances in order to open oneself up to the discovery of the other and its peculiarities – an action that essentially sums up the meaning of the whole of the Persona exhibition. 
In Filippo Berta’s Déjà vu (2008) a seemingly playful game of tug of war between six pairs of twins elicits a reflection on the competitiveness that underlies our existence: a metaphorical return to Bellum omnium contraomnes where you fight people with the same genetic makeup. In the work of Filippo Berta, it is the mise-en-scène of small everyday gestures that bring out the conflict and tension inherent in the relationship between man and society. The series of videos and photographs on display are the result of collective performances in which seemingly banal actions assume an allegorical value in order to unmask the conformism prevalent in our lives.

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Era lì da sempre was born while Lucia Veronesi was staying in Norway. The work, created from rocks and materials deriving from industrial processes, consists of elements gathered during numerous walks, of which they record traces and memories, as a sort of random sampling. In the installation – the title of which has a vaguely existential flavour that maybe refers to the state of abandonment of the materials gathered – the artist places light elements, such as textiles, with more massive sculptural parts, created in rock and plaster. Era lì da sempre thus appears to have been made from heterogeneous forms, from rejects (or the less noble elements) of the landscape and the production cycle, pulped and ripped textiles. Veronesi gives new life to these, giving them new meaning as constituent elements of a new landscape. A landscape that is hypothetical, mental and speculative, but nonetheless fascinating and emotionally pregnant. There coexist in the work, therefore, natural components and anthropomorphic material, organic-type needs and the hidden signs of our industrial world, both part of a complex orography that proceeds by suggestion, by fragments, by parataxis, by the addition of subsequent elements. The work, remounted and remodelled according to the layout of the room in Casa Testori, dialogues with the sections of landscape visible from the window, in a continual cross-reference of material, chromatic and geometric fragments.

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Pietas arises from a desire to rewrite the myth of Medea, as told by Euripides, in a more real form, in which the events lose the aura and rigidity imposed by the myth, becoming humanized and updated to our own times. In Elisabetta Di Sopra’s work, Medea is no longer the mother who taints herself with the crime of the children to whom she gave birth from her own womb, but is the victim of the violence of our own times. Disoriented and stupefied by grief, she weeps for the children whose destiny she does not know, and of whom she desperately seeks a trace, some minimal sign that might indicate they are still alive. On a desolate beach (from which we see, anachronistically, the presence of large ships furrowing the sea), Medea, now old and no longer lucid, digs and takes to herself a scarf, a tee-shirt, some trousers, thrown up by the sea, emblems of an absence that cannot be restored. Her figure conserves echoes of Pasolini in her clothing, in her movements and in her restrained, almost hieratic desperation, for which it seems there can be no peace. Pietas is a reflection on the drama of contemporary immigration, on mothers who do not know the fate of their children and on the negated hopes of a better future, against which have dashed so many lives that must cross seas, climb walls, scale mountains or frontiers. The aged mother is thus doubly punished by destiny, with her grief and a bitter, infinite solitude.

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Camille is the artist’s homage to Claude Monet’s first wife, Camille Doncieux, who died at the early age of thirty-two in 1879. Michela Pomaro imagines that, in the intimacy of that brief relationship, Camille would have been the first witness to the cosmic pulverization of colour that was to mark Monet’s long and extraordinary career. Starting from this intuition, she imagined the work specifically created for this exhibition. Inside six parallelepipeds in Plexiglas, planned with extremely rigorous lines, almost like design objects, she has placed LED lights, each required to create a different visual effect. The boxes comprising the installation have been harmonized with each other, giving rise to a continually mutating chromatic concert. The colour is generated by an inaccessible source and flows into the space, redesigning it. As in much contemporary work, Michela Pomaro breaks free of the specific confines of painting, launching itself into a dimension that nevertheless remains strongly pictorial. Another factor, too, comes into play in the artist’s work – the dialogue between the formal certainty of the containers and the alchemistic, unfathomable and mysterious process taking place inside. The rational solidity of the boxes, which makes conceptual reference to the rectangularity of the canvas, makes more acute, by contrast, the transitory and mutable dimension of the colour.

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Lalla Lussu’s artistic quest aims to investigate the potential of paint to generate the unexpected, to determine rhythms, forms, geometrical shapes, structures and spaces that did not previously exist. The artist’s practice, procedural by nature, is based on free application of paint directly onto the supports, generally fabrics in jute or rough linen. These are then processed, pleated at uniform distances to render them agitated, cadenced and three-dimensional. This sculptural manner, contrary to the usual two-dimensionality of the pictorial image, is further strengthened by the installation of the work, not on a wall, but freely in the middle of the room, starting from the ceiling. Lussu thus overturns the logic of the work as a contemplative stasis to be observed frontally, and sets in motion interactive potentials. The spectators, in fact, have to move in a zigzag manner around the elements, as if walking in a wood, touching the surfaces with their bodies or delicately setting the fabric aside with their hands. Her forest is an imaginary one, inhabited by coloured trees, of which the surface, the roughness, the ripples and the perfumed bark are magically suggested by the canvas. The observers are invited to grasp the details by walking in the middle of it, moving freely like explorers venturing among the trees and losing themselves among the vivid colours of the tropical forest.

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For Maria Morganti, her website is a work of art. “I imagined this site as an integral part of my work, as a support for my obsessive habit of accumulating, withholding, recording and exhibiting. Since it is a lucubration, it will transform continually and will keep open a constantly mutating research”, we read on the home page. In the display designed for Casa Testori, the centre has been assigned to the computer, placed on the table that was once Giovanni Testori’s desk. It is open at the site to allow visitors to navigate it. The small panel Melma, a work resulting from dripping paint brushes, has been placed in the open drawer. Melma is also, however, the background of the home page of the site, confirming this symbiotic identity between Morganti’s artistic activity at a real level and its expansion into virtual terrain. On the lateral walls, on the other hand, Morganti has wished to exhibit two large summarizing screen displays, one representing the navigation tree of the site, the other a complete compilation of all the files that populate it. The printouts constitute the works Autoritratti 2019 and Archivio 2019, which effectively represents a glance at the artist herself. Two self-portraits that complete each other and cross-fertilize one another. The specifically catalogizing nature of the site, expressed by the self-portrait that presents the dense list of files, is destabilized by the tree which gives the idea, instead, of an organism in constant movement and mutation. Thus the site becomes, for the artist, a place in which to look at herself and also in which to let herself be looked at, by the navigators, but also by those hosted therein.

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Silvia Giambrone’s work is of a frankly political nature. It highlights and denounces the way in which females are demeaned through cultural models involving their bodies, through the conduct expected of them and by manipulation of their images. In particular, Il danno shows a standard female bodyin babydoll – typically viewed in a condition offering pleasure, erotic charge and seduction for men. It has nevertheless been deformed by an extraneous geometric element, placed at the groin, and by an extrusion at the abdomen, just above the navel. These presences bring to mind, respectively, sanitary pads and prostheses applied to the breasts to make them more voluminous. They compel the observer to see the body of that woman, who is without a face, and so has no identity of her own, as something extraneous to the logic of desire. Ironically, it appears as damage compared with stereotyped expectations. It shows how a small detail can determine a person’s life, conditioning their form, thoughts, time and freedom, while deviation is perceived today as limiting and crippling with respect to the logic of dominion. The photos of Baby dull document a performance created by the artist in a motel where she installed false metal eyebrows, fixing them to the wall with chains. The work, permanently installed a room of the motel, is an invitation to an intimate play of changing perspectives, gender and identity.

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For Linda Carrara, the surface is the place where the pictorial event has its genesis. The surface is the subject, marble or rock, as in the two works chosen for the exhibition. The surface is also that of the paper or canvas, which assume their visual identity through a process of mimesis. It is an experience founded on illustrious precedents. In her False Carrara marble series, for example, the artist takes her cue from an ancient tradition, that of Giotto’s or Beato Angelico’s false marbles in apparently peripheral areas of their fresco cycles. The marbles have often been seen as elements with a purely decorative value, but in reality their neutrality hides secrets and powerful references. The great composite work displayed on the rear wall of the room is an exercise in mimesis set up by the artist. An exercise that lends life and evocative energy to the pictorial surface by its simple visual resemblance to another surface, that of Carrara marble. In the composition, solemn in its appearance as a great polyptych, our perceptions are led astray. The stone, with its veins, seems to become a sky furrowed by the wind, almost a great new window opened onto space. But the surface is also at the centre of another of Carrara’s recent works: these are “frottage” pieces created by placing the canvases on the rocks by the banks of the Adda. These are the rocks that Leonardo would have looked at for his Milanese Vergini delle rocce paintings. In this case, too, the intense red used for the “frottage” suggests a hypothesis of mutations: the mineral element evokes, in mysterious form, a carnal event.

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