Three artists of very different styles and generations face each other in one of the most magical spaces of Casa Testori. At this point, the question of corruption becomes internal to art, with an energy all its own that attacks the works from within. This is the message we seem to get from the two ceramic vase-shaped sculptures by Alessandro Roma. One is collapsing upon itself, the other is intended to hold flowers which are nevertheless unable to grow there. The contrast between the original desire for beauty intrinsic to such works, and a drastically opposite process, appears as a lyrically emblematic evolution. Francesco Fossati makes reference, with his language perennially bordering upon the probable, to another inevitable aspect of reality. Artists themselves may often become a link in the perverse chain of corruption. Fossati’s label does not aim to tell a truth, but to unmask the ever-present risk of hypocrisy. We can create correct messages, while at the same time setting up perverse mechanisms as a result of our marketing decisions. A beautiful statue may become the tool of drug traffickers. The fact that it remains beautiful is a disturbing and thought-provoking problem. Alessandro Verdi, lastly, offers two very recent works, one of which was specifically conceived as part of the “art AGAINST corruption” project. The small human figure moving in a vacuum is the prototype, in fact, of the paintings on the columns of the Sala Testori at the Teatro Franco Parenti of Milan, which hosted the meeting that launched the project. In the second work, the small figure is seen against a vast cosmos, painted with intense blue pigment.

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To understand what this warning is about, we need only move to the Salon of Casa Testori. Three masters of contemporary Italian art are exhibiting here: Mimmo Paladino, Emilio Isgrò and Gianni Dessì. Paladino’s work is a sculpture created in 2013 and inspired by the troubled life-story of the great 16th century musician Gesualdo da Venosa. Like the twists of a serpent with neither head nor tail, a serpent from which we cannot free ourselves, a steel wire holds prisoner a head made of aluminium. This master, born in Paduli, considers himself first and foremost a painter, and for this reason says that “in my sculptures I have always thought of the artists who made use of this graphic architecture even in the past”. This inextricable knot holds captive the human icon, which Paladino nevertheless portrays with its irreducibile content of tension and beauty. The imagery already seen in Andrea Bianconi’s work undergoes here a dramatic and disturbing development. In his innumerable proclamations against the evil wrought by corruption upon people’s lives, Pope Francis – who has described this as a “social cancer” in his apostolic letter Evangelii Gaudium – has recourse to the metaphor of “ramification”: something that develops progressively and uncontrollably. Paladino’s work evokes this deleterious process.

Also exhibited in this room are four paintings from one of the most famous cycles by Emilio Isgrò: La costituzione cancellata. Rappresentazione di un crimine [The Constitution Cancelled: Portrayal of a Crime], from 2010. “I was pushed in this direction by the melancholy disappointment of an Italian who sees his country collapsing”, declared the artist when explaining the motive underlying this work. Cancellation is, in this case, an act of profound respect. The Constitution, Isgrò has said, “is a work of art, on a level with St. Francis’s Cantico and Dante’s Commedia. It is written in perfect Italian, simple, bureaucratic but without falling into gobbledygook. The fathers of the constitution were persons of the highest culture”. But the Constitution cancelled is also the “Portrayal of a Crime”, as the full title states. Isgrò makes use of cancellations to show how far too many people play games with the text of the constitution. These, in fact, are the surviving words that provide titles for the four works on display: “A handicapped indivisible, Secret associations are notprohibited, Those born in February are Senators as of right, Dated 27 December 1947. Respect combined with condemnation, veneration combined with bitterness: these are the sensations communicated by Isgrò’s work.

Gianni Dessì’s diptych is a very recent work. It consists of oil paintings on canvas, done in a sort of black on black. One of the works, A&E, refers to the event that symbolically represents the advent of corruption. The serpent appears as the great corruptor. The other work, Insieme [Together], has another human figure: to the left of the figure is a geometrical element which, cold and neutral, seems to spring like a trap.

At the centre of the room, Katja Noppes has a surprise for us. This is a simple Installation that sets in motion a process from which we cannot escape. Images of corruption, war and injustice, gathered from all latitudes over more than 25 years, are reflected in the mirror. We see only the reflection, and our own image mingles with them, as does that of the enchanted environment in which we find ourselves. Corruption affects us, therefore. We cannot get away from it and we cannot illude ourselves that we have nothing to do with what we see. There is no room for neutrality. Extrapersonal, peripersonal and personal spaces are superimposed.

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The art AGAINST corruption itinerary starts with a work with emblematic content: Italy upside down by Andrea Bianconi, AiLati (2017), a work specifically conceived for this exhibition. Bianconi, an artist from Vicenza, lives and works in Italy and in the USA. He has intended, in this work, to be outrightly frank. With the slender, precise, marks of his acrylic pen, marks that suggest a seismograph, he draws a map in line with the perspective made famous by Luciano Fabro’s work of 1968. Italy as an upturned country, ready to implode. Bianconi’s delicate lines launch a gentle warning.

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Olga Schigal, born in Russia

Olga Schigal presents a camper – her camper – as a sculpture and as a performance. A nest, into which she would like to move permanently, a mobile home, with nothing superfluous, without any territorial, sentimental or spiritual association. Shoonya, therefore, is the name of a means of transport and of a work. The term derives from yoga and indicates the meeting point between solid and void, a matrix from which anything might originate. The creation of a connection with something else, and also a connection with visitors, since Olga Schigal welcomes them in her house on wheels and tells them her story. It is, at one and the same time, inside and outside the exhibition, inside and outside the art system, poised on the ridge, with no roots in anything but itself.

Claudia Alexandrino, born in Portugal

The Portuguese origin of the designer Claudia Alexandrino, known as an illustrator under her pseudonym Shut Up Claudia, means that the idea of saudade has strong connotations for her. At the same time, she is fully aware of the difficulty of making this concept comprehensible and sharing the sensation. She has therefore decided to decompose the idea, simplifying it as far as possible, using childish references and simple, immediate symbols. Two stylized houses are linked to each other by a dashed line, twisting and broken, indicating the complexity of the completed itinerary. Steps and a podium symbolize objects which have been aimed for and reached. Past and present coexist in the same scene. The title of the work, Matar a saudade, is an expression indicating the moment when this indefinable feeling disappears, when the desire to see again a person, place or thing is satisfied. It is the phrase Claudia Alexandrino says when she returns to Portugal.

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Agne Raceviciute, born in Lithuania 

From the spaces and times of the memory of her native land and of her grandparents, Agne Raceviciute’s quest assumes a different form, exploring individual movements and interpersonal relationships. Two monoliths are brought together by the title Schautrieb, a Freudian term that indicates a scopic pulsion and that embraces every way of seeing, being seen or seeing oneself. Moving away from the idea of the naivety or innocence of the observer’s eye, the artist investigates this condition, constructing a narration that unites reality and fiction. Thus the protagonist, immortalized in a life-size photo, generates images and thoughts that create a fluorescent lattice of connections. The representation of these trajectories and these relationships is the object of this investigation, and is part of a long-term project.

T-yong Chung, born in Korea

T-yong Chung’s sculpture is a perfect fusion between east and west, between origin and destination. Taking the classical canons of ancient statuary as its starting point, it seeks, with a removal of material far beyond traditional chisel work, the most extreme, and at the same time the most interior, limit of the object’s recognisability. A search for the essence carried out with constant tension as it strives to maintain an equilibrium that risks overbalancing at any moment, if too much or too little is taken away. The work presented at Casa Testori, in what was once Giovanni Testori’s study, is a double tribute to the house owner in a foreign language, offered both through a plaster bust and through a mask dominating the landscape from the balcony. The academic nature of the classical portrait is cancelled with the use of a sander, which enables the creation of a relationship between solids and voids. The image is to be completed, therefore, only through the observer’s memory or imagination. The lack of one part compels us to reconstruct, to activate our gaze. The person who once lived in these rooms is brought back by the artist.

Stefan Milosavljević, born in Serbia

Midnight Sunrise is a pair of iron rockets, painted in pastel colours. Its title evokes two natural moments that cannot coexist and refers to the artist’s childhood memories, and in particular to the light that follows the explosion of a bomb. The starting point, in this case too, is therefore the artist’s personal memories and his attempt to create a tangible testimonial to his memories of the war, after realizing that he has no actual proof of his presence at a historical moment of such importance. The colour of the sculptures derives, therefore, from his analysis of images in the public domain, photos of the Belgrade sky after bombing, and from a sampling of pixels and colours, creating a luminosity that evokes that of the sun, but taking place at a moment when everything is dark. Boom, just fireworks, his mother always said, to reassure Stefan during the bombings.

Appocundria, Casa Testori, 2019 © Maki Ochoa-35

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Appocundria, Casa Testori, 2019 © Maki Ochoa-36

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Adi Haxhiaj, born in Albania

A painting is, first and foremost, an object. Starting from this premise, Adi Haxhiaj’s poetics have modelled and remodelled over time, confusing and superimposing subject and object, mingling views and viewpoints. O.T. has as its support the cushion of a divan which the artist found in a tip for oversize refuse and which he used as a backrest for years. When he moved house, he realized he could transform it into a pictorial support, like many other objects around him, on which to immortalize the view of the divan itself. The cushion became a collector of memories, fragmented and almost unrecognizable. It conserves traces of events that, with an inversion of its viewpoint, it has witnessed. His painting, in turn, reveals its material essence, clotting and leaving most of the surface bare. This consistency, at times repellent, is exaggerated in the frame of the small drawing made with washable ink on paper, born as a sketch to pass the time and then transformed into a self-portrait. A wasp is immortalized as it collides with a mosquito net that prevents it from returning to where it had built its nest. The starting point is a real experience, the observation of conduct dictated by violence and a tear. At the same time, the chequered line portraying the mosquito net cannot help evoking the place where the drawing was made, that is to say the cloakroom of the Fondazione Prada and its metal grid, on which the artist got caught.

Agnese Skujina, born in Latvia

Agnese Skujina, who usually uses paper as the support for her liquid landscapes, has chosen to work on wood for this occasion: planks from an old parquet that the artist’s grandfather bought for his house but could not lay because of the damp. Fifty years later, Agnese Skujina’s father used it, choosing it as the floor for the home he was building little by little. A third generation, that of the artist, gave new life to this material, painting two distinct landscapes on it, one Latvian and one Italian, then decomposing them and recomposing them to make a new unit. The painting emerges on the surface like a patch of damp, fluid and indistinct in form, without any apparent figuration or any possibility of recognizing a subject.

Appocundria, Casa Testori, 2019 © Maki Ochoa-32

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Appocundria, Casa Testori, 2019 © Maki Ochoa-34

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Saba Masoumian, born in Iran

Two miniature theatres show signs of life that once was. Saba Masoumian’s boxes depict a space in which memories are superimposed on the subconscious, in which symbols, metaphors and allegories predominate to the extent that they become, in some cases, repellent in their excessive cruelty. They portray scenes of man’s abandoning and abandonment, images made truculent by the contrast between elements linked to childhood innocence and references to blood and bodies. Uninhabited rooms, dense with memories, of scraps of life and slices of flesh, rooms waiting to be inhabited once more, or to be forgotten at last.

Appocundria, Casa Testori, 2019 © Maki Ochoa-5

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Barbara Prenka, born in Kosovo

Rhapsody is an itinerary embracing twenty-four canvases. Twenty-four stages conceived as referring to a movement towards destinations that unceasingly shift and alter. In each of the works, colours, shapes and brush strokes flow and reappear, are conserved and transformed, return unexpectedly. A journey that is broken, interrupted, begun again. In the artist’s intentions, the work arises from a sense of the rhapsody as a complex that unifies, in which each single piece is a narration, but also the sequel to another tale. A continual evolution of migratory movements, a continual evolution that does not stagnate in rooted stability, but maintains the echo of an impossibility to settle, remaining in suspended tension. 

Hsing-Chun Shih, born in Saudi Arabia

Hsing-Chun Shih’s installation includes three elements that revolve around an audio track, a recording of the sounds of a textile factory in Taipei, Taiwan, where the artist grew up. It is impossible not to think, then, of the noises arriving, in workdays, from Testori Group, a factory alongside Casa Testori, and which are superimposed upon those from another distant factory. At the core of the project is a fabric, dismantled so as to show, in its central part, the profile of a landscape, white on white, the evanescence of which depends on how it is manipulated, in a precarious equilibrium implemented through a precise creative destruction, to which a photo bears witness. These same threads, having been detached, are then resewn and used to recreate a map. Embroidery on the curtain defines another silhouette, glimpsed only against the light: it is the profile of Taiwan in one of the first maps made of the island.

Alek O., born in Argentina

In the work of Alek O., the original function, and sometimes the texture, is lost, but the memory remains under other semblances. They are reassembled, with an apparent rigour that reveals an imprecise geometry, dictated by the material itself and therefore by the story of these objects. Thye change shape, but do not lose their memory, they conserve it even in their titles, which sometimes refer to their first situation, they transform the object into its previous owner. This is the case both with Flatland, a composition of doormats found here and there, and with Paolo, a curtain that belongs to another space, marked by the sun, impressed on it like a long exposure photo. Frozen on a canvas, it no longer separates interior from exterior, it no longer protects from other eyes, it shows this life to new observers.

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Appocundria, Casa Testori, 2019 © Maki Ochoa-4

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Appocundria, Casa Testori, 2019 © Maki Ochoa-16

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Felipe Aguila, born in Chile

Space, on the other hand, is the central element of the work that Felipe Aguila has created specially for Appocundria and which will continue to evolve until the end of the exhibition. The artist, in fact, first drew his own idea of home, then asked a series of friends who live far away to do the same thing on the same sheet of paper. To depict heimat / hogar / home. A letter in drawings, therefore, one that crossed the world, sometimes getting lost, sometimes not reaching its destination, sometimes not returning to the sender. The title of this work is Nyumbani, a word that means home in Swahili, a language especially disseminated in Africa but also common in communities far distant from the African continent, in virtue of its links with maritime commerce. The reference to temporal and spatial distances continues in the drawings of the series called Urbanización de la memoria. Here the reference to architecture, society and politics becomes more explicit. Drifting through these sheets of paper of varying weights and background tints are buildings and landscapes that seem suddenly to disappear, whether for the lightness of the pencil strokes, or for the precariousness of the structures portrayed – lacking foundations, propped up by scaffolding or threatened by natural disasters. These visions take as their starting point real buildings that the artists has seen personally or in photographs. Some of these places no longer exist, however, or have been altered over time, and Felipe Aguila rebuilds them, as in a dream, relying on his memories. Allusion to duration and distance, to stable points of reference, is limited to a small number of these drawings. Their removal from the others implies the presence of a constellation of other times and spaces.

Aleksander Velišček, born in Slovenia

The prepustnica was a pass that enabled those living close to the border to cross between Slovenia and Italy, before the former country entered Europe. A document that avoided long queues at the frontier, enabling holders to move freely between the two states. For Aleksander Velišček it is inevitably linked to childhood memories. His work also becomes a socio-political reflection on the sense of frontiers, on the shared conviction that a historical moment and its features have been left behind, whereas in reality they are reappearing today. The twelve canvases painted by the artist portray this document, decomposed between figuration and abstraction. They tell the story of a single family, but of many nations. The installation opens up at the corner between two walls, just like the pass itself. Above it is the one painting that does not have this document as its subject: a European flag unfurled against a leaden sky.

Appocundria, Casa Testori, 2019 © Maki Ochoa-12

Appocundria, Casa Testori, 2019 © Maki Ochoa-15

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Appocundria, Casa Testori, 2019 © Maki Ochoa-13

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Stefan Milosavljević, born in Serbia

In Carnivous Carnival, too, the dimensions of play and disguise are essential. It is a reflection on the relationship between prey and predator, on the capacity for camouflage and penetration of every form of violence and cruelty, especially in their subtlest forms, which become fascinating even while remaining bestial.

Mohamed Keita, born in Côte d’Ivoire

This autobiographical narration, though never explicit in Mohamed Keita’s work, is essential if we are to understand why his gaze dwells on certain details and the direction it takes. The photographer left his native land at the age of 14 and undertook, alone, a journey through Guinea, Mali, Algeria, the Sahara, Libya and Malta. After three years he reached Rome, now aged 17. He experienced living on the street and immortalizes this same street with his attentive, unrhetorical gaze. He portrays his Rome, sunny and luminous, and gathers traces of those passing through or who live there.

Nicolas Vamvouklis, born in Greece

In 2016, Berlin Zoo took its flamingos into care as a cautionary measure after the first cases of H5N8 ’flu were confirmed in Germany. Filming this moment in a loop that repeats ad infinitum and keeping a birdwatcher’s distance, as an observer external to the system, Nicolas Vamvouklis traces a parallel between human and animal society, underlining elements of dominance, oppression and exclusion. He also refers, obviously, to his own native island, Lesbos, one of the focal points of the migratory flows and of the European humanitarian crisis, as well as a paradise for photographers of birds.
Underlining this relationship, the environmental installation Granted there is a wall, what’s going on behind it? gathers a series of objects that accompany the artist in his movements between Greece and Italy and that summarize the relationship between inhabited space, object and body. They are elements that appear shorn of context in the exhibition space, but which in reality are found everywhere: they often belong to other lives, other homes. They are the reification of persons and moments that were essential to the artist’s formation.

Appocundria, Casa Testori, 2019 © Maki Ochoa-10

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Appocundria, Casa Testori, 2019 © Maki Ochoa-11

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