The sign is at the centre of Marta Spagnoli’s research. It is a sign that does not spring from predetermined hypotheses and is freed of any need to have a meaning. The sign is the primogenial entity, which first and foremost gives life to the painting on the surface for which it is intended. It is by no chance that, as in the large-scale work presented at Casa Testori, the sign assumes the filamentous aspect of a natural organism actively inhabiting the canvas, like continuously mutating writing. The sign, for Marta Spagnoli, effectively acquires pictorial value in the

moment in which it is free from intentionality and emotiveness, accepting its reduction to a trace, a clue, the simple result of an act that may sometimes simply coincide with the action of the brush. It is a condition where there are

neither hierarchies nor sequences that can restore a logic to these signs. Painting thus becomes an open field in which is enacted a re-immersion of forms, always poised between the archaic and the present, between the physical and the mythical dimensions. The sign, however empty of content it may be, never relapses into abstraction. The surface, as can be seen clearly in Untitled, thus becomes a place of great pictorial intensity, a field in which multiple and elementary energies gather. The canvas therefore becomes a space inhabited by these sequences, which are not simple translations of the real into writing, but pregnant particles from which to await new and ongoing processes of meaning.

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Non qui and Nebbia are two works created by Nazzarena Poli Maramotti during a residence for artists at Dale i Sunnfjord, Norway in 2019. Her painting has been very much influenced by this place. The interminable days followed by the brief, light Scandinavian nights inspire – and almost impose – a constant vision of majestic and pervasive nature, obsessively constellated by lakes, fjords, waterfalls and rain. The artist has a long acquaintance with northern lights, having lived in Nuremburg for many years, and this familiarity has probably freed her painting from the need for precise formal definition. The result is that characteristically fluid, atmospheric nature we recognize in the two works, of very different dimensions, exhibited at Casa Testori. In Non qui, we witness something like a struggle between the damp omnipresence pervading the canvas and the Tiepolo-like sky blue that forces its presence and finally breaks through with great intensity. This struggle, in truth, becomes for Poli Maramotti an excuse to make the pictorial field the real subject of her painting. Here she can exercise the full potential of painting itself, in a series of contrasts and continual stylistic fractures. In Nebbia, the gentler paintwork, almost like a homogenous and muffled light, gives way in the upper part to a thin band of tormented painting – like a tiny drama within the pictorial event, strongly negating any possible naturalistic interpretation of the work.

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In the work of Serena Vestrucci, daily existence often provides the raw material for her artistic experience. Raw material in the most concrete sense of the term: if, in the cycle Trucchi [Make ups], her canvases were painted with eye-shadows, robbing her technique from daily life, in these new works presented at the exhibition, it is her bed sheet that takes the place of the canvas. As she herself has explained, “every night I tie a biro to a different part of my body and let it trace freely the marks of my movements, uncontrolled and unconditioned by my active mind”. The subject of these two works, therefore, is what the artist’s body does during her sleep. The result is light traces, indecipherable in their development, which relate very delicately and chastely the substrata of her conscience. These markings are like seismographs of an involuntary artistic action. And the involuntary nature, rigorously respected by the artist during the process, becomes an aesthetic factor, due to the overall gracefulness governing the combination of the markings and the support. In a recent pamphlet, Giorgio Agamben, commenting Artemisia Gentileschi’s Allegoria della pittura, recalled that sleep, for Aristoteles, was “the possession of consciousness in power”, while the state of waking coincides with “consciousness in action”. This power, Agamben explains, is not “the generalized power that can become this, that or anything in a child”, but that “proper to those who have acquired the corresponding art and knowledge”. We can therefore imagine that, with La dimensione del sonno, Serena Vestrucci left free and infinite space to her state of “power”.

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Giorgia Severi’s research is directed towards the environment and the way in which it interacts geologically, biologically, culturally and emotively with man. In particular, her work investigates the precarious and fragile condition of the landscape as well as the ongoing sudden changes caused by the devastating anthropic presence, which has reshaped every corner of the earth to conform to its own needs. About the creation (Rocca Pendice, parete Messner) is a “frottage” of a mountain face made with charcoal directly on a tapestry surface in the Euganean Hills, an area especially exposed to phenomena of erosion caused by climate change. The work is an imprint of a small area of the mountain, a cast that silently evokes its presence, unmeasurable age and gigantic extension, which seem enormous compared with the presence of a single man witnessing them as an observer. But it is also a technical device that measures bidimensionally a transitory state of the landscape, a precarious and fleeting form that is destined to change, alter, erode or dissolve – exactly as a photographic image testifies to a past moment that can never come again with the same features. The tapestry therefore proves a sampling of a precise moment that not only conserves a hint of how things were, but metaphorically shows what it is that we want to protect from advancing time and the havoc wrought by man.

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Chris Rocchegiani’s artistic practice is characterized by the simultaneous presence of several styles and executive solutions, referring to different pictorial modes. In her canvases, in fact, we recognize sections of differing natures. There are gestural and informal parts, characterized by the predominance of signs and action. There are aniconic areas of pure colour, tending towards more lyrical aspects. There are episodes where frugal, synthetic figuration is suggested, where elements on the canvas seem scraps of a reality reconstructed through essentially mnemonic means. The artist’s work is therefore based on a multiple, discontinuous and metamorphic language, differing linguistically from the more usual pictorial forms, which are based on a monolithic sense of identity. For Rocchegiani, in fact, painting is the exercise of intimate liberty, a tormented inquiry that, while plunging forward in a clear, programmed direction, also anarchically allows retreat, re-examination, dissipation, polyhedral development, contradiction and zigzagging. Her canvases are thus fields of possibilities, of uncertainties that are overcome but which may reappear, of colour that is present but may lead to second thoughts. There are so many real or potential paintings to be stratified on the surface, all coexisting in a state of continual tension. Observers must exercise themselves by recomposing and re-stitching it all to grasp the words whispered on the canvas by the elements.

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A fragmented world examines the physical, chemical and geological interconnections between the many players that are part of a complex and detailed system of relationships. In long sequence shot, the video shows a runner on the slopes of Etna, rendered in severe black and white. The man moves rapidly in a rugged, lunar-like landscape, among open faults, enormous masses, lava seas, depressions and sudden drops. He has no apparent destination and his body seems the only sign of life amid the seeming immobility of the gaunt, bare and inhospitable volcanic surroundings. The work is inspired by the Theory of Fracture, studied by the physicist Bruno Giorgini from the 1960s, in which the scholar analyses the behaviour and reaction of variables in the presence of breakages. The fracture is followed by an unpredictable, chaotic situation, with variables that go crazy in the face of a combination of complex interactions never previously experienced. It is a condition found in natural, geological and physical phenomena, but it also appears in economy and finance. Elena Mazzi’s and Sara Tirelli’s work also alludes to what happens when it is human equilibria that fracture, that is to say, when individual, social and political variables are considered. From this perspective, the runner seems to move on the edge of an abyss, leaving the observer in constant apprehension. The risks he is facing are exactly the same as those we ourselves are incurring unawares.

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The works by Debora Hirsch presented in the exhibition are complementary and the relationship between them is unsettling. The first work, Iconography of silence, consists of two videos, assembledas a diptych. The artist tackles the dramatic theme of abuse of women, choosing a stark language that concedes nothing to rhetoric or the spectacular. In the first video, fragmentary images of violence recorded by CCTV emerge from the rear of the screen. They are frantic for a few instants then give way to disconcertion and silence. In the second, we see little by little, in red letters, the composition of real phrases that have accompanied the violent episodes. The flow of words eventually establishes a texture that pierces the eye. The violence thus finds a voice which the absence of sound characterizing the work renders all the more impactful. The mirror surface of the two screens completes the sense of the piece: observers find their own image there, captured by the video as if to certify the impossibility of their standing aside. Opposite, the large canvas from the Firmamento series has a compensatory effect. The composition is airy and imaginative. Hirsch lays out on the surface of the canvas, very freely, elements derived from Latin visual sensibility. The appearance is deliberately neutral and decorative. The sensation, for the observer, is that this tangle of shapes is hiding a thaumaturgic function, which moderates and counterbalances the evil sealed within the black boxes of the video.

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Isabella Pers’s research has derived, in recent years, from a direct dialogue with citizens and political activists living along coasts and on small islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans where lives are at risk from the gradual but inexorable rise in the sea level. Her paintings bear witness to the dramatic effects of climate change on people’s lives – people who have undergone a transition from the condition of natural paradise to that of the disaster which, as single citizens of this world, we cannot easily avert, if not by reconsidering our lifestyle and attempting to limit the use of fossil fuels. The recent drawings in The Aba series, instead, reproduce the screenshots of several information or tour sites that propose trips to places that are destined to disappear in the ensuing years as a result of the rising tides, Venice included. The invitation proves a mournful one, all things considered, a melancholy summons to enjoy these beauties when we are already on the edge of a precipice. The video Present relates an action created by the artist together with immigrants who had escaped from countries at war or who were victims of dictatorships. It is a walk which took place towards the top of a hill on the Carso, alongside one of the First World War trenches, the signs of which, dug into the ground, seem the scars of a ravaged body. They represent symbolically the useless and over-reassuring frontiers traced by men. The action thus becomes the story of a meeting between different worlds and cultures, but also expresses a wish for solidarity and understanding that goes beyond the limits traced by diffidence.

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Esther Stocker’s artistic practice is directed towards the perceptive nature of the image and space, examining it both in paintings as well as in three-dimensional pieces and installations. Her works, lean and rational, analyse the optical ambiguity underlying geometric matrices, repetitions of the same forms and superimpositions of several patterns. Using simple and minimal tools such as the line, the polygon or simple black and white, Stocker creates visual structures where the elements force the eye into a condition of problematic interpretation or potential spatial ambiguity. The uncertainty, the conflict between several interpretative hypotheses, between two-dimensional forms and perspective views, create in the spectator a state of disorientation and playful amusement. But they also arouse fretfulness, since it is difficult to elude the desire to interpret except by looking elsewhere, closing our eyes or, when possible, touching the works with our hands. Stocker thus demonstrates instrumental limits embedded in the visual means with which we are accustomed to view the world, compelling us to challenge their pregnancy and real effectiveness. Her works, moreover, testify to the ability of the image, and art more generally, to construct worlds that are not there and to create indeterminate, abstract spaces. Places where the eye and the observer can lose the bearings that tie us to normality and lose their way.

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The works by Renata Boero presented in Libere tutte are part of her series of Cromogrammi. They are exhibited on the veranda, in the environment visually linked to the garden, with which context they establish a strict, intensely poetic dialogue. The canvases are not painted, but are the result of tried and tested processes whereby the colours released by certain selected herbs are made to drip onto the spread out canvases, which the artist then designs and folds, giving rhythm to the surface. The colours run and trip up in the pattern, creating ever-varying material concretions, and so giving rise to continual transformations of the surface. The impact with the sun and air during the drying phase completes the process, also allowing the atmospheric agents to act on the surfaces. The result is works in which nature comes into play, not as a subject to be represented, but as a controlled factor that acts on the making of the work. Time also has a role in the process, in the gradual consolidation of the folds, for example, where it collaborates in the physical and sculptural dimension of the work. The display on the veranda of Casa Testori has also emphasized another feature of these pieces by Renata Boero: the architectural dimension resulting from their verticality. The artist’s own thought comes into play in this vertical tension, since she associates an unexpected upward energy with these natural totems: complete formal identities that have acquired a spatial autonomy of their own.

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